[Adam and Eve had no concept of "obey or disobey." They knew no evil, and therefore their knowledge of "sin" was that it had to be just as nice as everything else. They had the same view of the serpent. Biblically, we now know we "sin" because we now have knowledge of good and evil.
Are you ever going to address the absurdity of a deity sacrificing himself to himself to rid himself of anger, or are you just going to keep repeating yourself and making me to do the same?]
It's not absurdity. It's love.
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God tells them to not eat from the tree, but, like the guy you were bloody responding to said, they "had no concept of 'obey or disobey'". Hell, not only would they not know that obedience was right and disobedience was wrong, but they also wouldn't know whether to trust the invisible guy over the talking snake (hint: at least the snake told the truth!). And, given that God knew that we would disobey him, and allowed Satan to have influence in the Garden of Eden enough to draw and deceive them into "disobedience", it is very controlled "free will", to the point of it *gasp* not existing at all!
So, it is still absurdity.
I never understood why the god damn tree was there to begin with. It's like telling a kid not to touch something right in front of them. If God doesn't understand human nature, no one does.
If God didn't want them to eat from the tree, he shouldn't have put it there in the first place. It's all his fault.
"Yes they did. Because God said "do not eat of.." the following trees, they knew not to eat of it. They also knew that if they ate from it they would be disobeying God. They had free will as much as us, but the same thing happened to them as us. Eve was tempted by Satan to eat off the tree God told her not to. "
True, but they didn't know why as they had no knowledge of good and evil, remember? Without understanding the consequences of ones actions one cannot be held responsible for them. This is the basis of competency hearings in law; if you can't understand that what you did was wrong you can't be punished for doing it.
"It's not absurdity. It's love."
You have a very strange definition of "love."
"They had free will as much as us, but the same thing happened to them as us. Eve was tempted by Satan to eat off the tree God told her not to"
Right, so let's work this out step by step.
1) God creates sin, despite hating it (afterall, he created EVERYTHING).
And so on.
Yeah, there's nothing absurd about any of that.
I've had this discussion with fundies before. It's like talking to a brick wall.
"They just knew they were supposed to obey."
"God told them what they should do, they knew they were supposed to listen."
"Do you think Adam was dumb? He was really smart! He invented writing and everything! Of course he knew what he should do."
It's not absurdity. It's love.
If it walks like an absurdity, sounds like an absurdity, looks like an absurdity... well, it is obviously love.
So then, the bible god is the god of absurdity!
See, they should have known better BEFORE they ate from the Tree of Knowledge!
Yeah, right. Yahweh puts a big fat temptation to innocents in their garden, tells them if they eat from it, they will "die." What does that mean to a creature who has never seen death and is ignorant of everything? Exactly nothing.
Then he just happened to be "out of the cosmos" for a mo so's the Serpent which he created could go play with his naive humans. How conveeeenient.
Of course it was a set-up!
(Or it's an allegory on the level of Pandora's Box. You pick.)
@Helen Beck: Yeah, I always did wonder where exactly God was when the serpent was talking to Eve. Nice reference to Pandora's Box. Yet another misogynistic myth blaming women for the downfall of mankind. At least in that myth, it's clearly stated that Zeus intentionally made Pandora curious so that she WOULD open the box.
conequences. They didn't know what evil was. They trusted everybody (maybe the serpent said "god says it's OK now). They certainly didn't expect their "loving" god to throw a hissy fit about something he should have prevented, by keeping his failures out of the garden, and disown and punish them and all the innocents that followed for a single mistake.
So much for love
so much is tyranny
{quiet chuckle} Interestingly, I've heard a suggestion that the Levites' original god wasn't the cardinal warmonger Yhwh (of, I guess, the tribe of Benjamin?), but the wise serpent Leviathan (Levi, Leviathan...). Whatever the Yhwh cult did to force the Leviathan cult to acknowledge Yhwh as supreme, it didn't take proper hold at first. The Levites couldn't resist portraying Leviathan in such a way to show him as humanity's true hero.
I don't think they were anticipating unconditional obedience to be trumpeted THAT heavily as a virtue. Of course, it wasn't until the Book of Jubilees that anyone tried to portray the Eden serpent as a full-bore demon (he was identified as Gadreel, a corrupted Grigori who also introduced warfare to humanity). After that came the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, which identified him with...your pick of names. Belial? Satan? Azazel? Amitiel? Sammael? Asmodeus?
Anyway...You'd think that the fundamentalists would realize that if (as in this understanding of the Eden debacle) "good" and "obedience" are perfect synonyms...well...how does one then define God as "good"? To which person or what precepts does HE swear fealty to? (You may not answer Chuck Norris, Vin Diesel, or Joseph Joestar)
God tells Adam and Eve not to eat the apples, they do it anyway.
Parents tell their kids not to have sex (abstinence), yet there's a good chance they'll do it anyway.
I see a pattern here...
They knew that God said not eat it, but they didn't know it was wrong to do it anyway UNLESS obeying/disobeying God is independent of good/evil. Which would explain a lot about fundies, actually.
Also, you still didn't address the greater absurdity that is Jesus's "sacrifice".
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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