The story of Adam and Eve is part of the Biblical mythology of Original Sin. Christians, Muslims and Jews are all 'people of the book' who take as holy the stories of the Hebrew era. In this story, the existence of death and suffering are attributed to the 'sin' of eating from the 'tree of knowledge'. Before this event, there was no death of suffering. Adam and Eve were innocent, and obeyed a serpent that told them to eat from the tree. Apparently, they obeyed the wrong being, because God's punishment was to inflict death and suffering upon them and all their ancestors, including such niceties as making childbirth painful for women.
The story fails to present any valid morals and instead proposes that (a) it is acceptable to punish people for the sins of others (original sin) and (b) that death is a suitable punishment for disobedience (ever wondered why so many oppressive governments were bedfellows with established religions?). Also Adam and Eve's children must have slept with their own parents. It is an immoral story that we shouldn't suffer upon children until they are old enough to understand it as a religious myth. God is shown to be a bad parent, uncaring. The logic of the story is faulty. The story itself, in the same way as other religious texts formed, is a compilation and redaction of religious myths, and has no consistent single author.
Contents:
The Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism all contain the myth of Adam and Eve as the first two created people. Genetically, in-breeding results in mutations and infertile offspring, and the other sciences noted all point to evolution and more standard biological development as the real creator of the Human species. So, what is done with the story of Adam and Eve?
"God, being a pure spirit, has no hands, and He causes His creatures to develop one from another by the power which He has imparted to Nature. If, therefore, the Lord made Adam from the dust of the earth, we must understand that man came out of that earth under the Divine Influence and yet after a natural manner.""History of Magic" by Eliphas Levi
Eliphas Levi is saying is that the method by which God created the first Human beings was via evolution. God, if it existed, created the Universe using the Big bang in a way that would facilitate the evolution of mankind on Earth following normal natural laws of nature. Adam and Eve may represent the first two Human Beings, or the first conscious ones. But basically, this portrays god as a god of the gaps: As nature and science account for the existence of life and consciousness, God itself is no longer directly responsible or necessary in order to explain these things.
After Adam and Eve had children, how did they proceed onto the third generation? The children must have slept with each other, or their own parents. How do you explain this to an inquisitive child without condoning incest? Incest was the order of the day, and would have been required for two or three generations. The same applies to the story of Noah's Ark. The children of Noah's family and his wife's family must have slept with members of their parent's family, or each other. Any further generations would again be faced with the same choice.
Biology
The main problem is not morals, it can be argued that just because it is immoral does not mean that it didn't happen. The main problem is biological. Interbreeding two families causes severe retardation, mutation and infertility. This happens to isolated Human population even when there are more then two families. The problem increases with severity the more the inbreeding occurs.
"...full-sibling or parent-child incest results in about 17% child mortality and 25% child disability, for a combined result of about 42% nonviable offspring"Donald Brown, 'Human Universals' pp123
The phenomenon of nonviable offspring from breeding between closely related family members is not limited to Humans, but to most life, especially amongst mammals and multicellular organisms:
"A study of 38 captive mammalian species found a cross-species average of around 33% offspring mortality resulting from closely incestuous matings"Donald Brown, 'Human Universals' pp124
Due to the non viable offspring that result from incest, which gets worse with each generation, the Adam and Eve story cannot be the literal whole truth. When a Christian next time relies on the urban myth of "Christian Family Values" then wander how they would explain to someone the big question of "What happened after the Flood?" The only moral escape route is to admit that the Adam and Eve story is a metaphor. The only biologically correct explanation known is that we evolved slowly from lower animals so that incest was never a problem.
There are many "trees that are most pleasing" in the Garden of Eve. However:
"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
Innocence
Adam and Eve did not know of good and evil. They were innocent. They did not know of deceit, anger, lust or evil. The serpent lied to them but they would not have known that the serpent's intents were not good. They couldn't have known, so they believed what the serpent said. This isn't Adam and Eve's fault, but ask yourself if God knew that they would have believed the serpent, why did God not stop the serpent? God itself could easily have picked the serpent up and thrown it out of the Garden of Eve. If impurity or non-innocence are ground for God throwing you out of the Garden of Eden, then God should have thrown the serpent out. Only two conclusions are possible:
Number one contradicts God throwing out Adam and Eve because they disobeyed God. Number two, however, is illogical as God would have known that Adam and Eve did not know or understand evil and could not have mistrusted the serpent. It cannot have been a test. In short: It makes no logical sense to claim that the Adam and Eve story is a true explanation of morality, evil or mankind's imperfection. Mankind is not perfect. If God exists, God created mankind as not perfect. The Adam and Eve story was a failed attempt by us to explain why we are not perfect.
The Adam and Eve theodicy fails as an explanation for why we choose evil sometimes, original sin is not a valid explanation for why God created evil. Also it is an immoral story, for God punishes people who chose an action without knowing that such a choice was bad.
Punishment for disobedience
God makes a command known, but makes a death threat as a punishment. A death threat is not a suitable punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge. A death threat should only be issued under serious circumstances, not as a punishment for curiosity or disobedience. This story demonstrates God's wrath and anger and shows us that God is not forgiving. If we use this story as an example for ethical thinking, we can conclude that we can kill or shorten the lives of those who do not do as we say! During the Dark Ages, coincidentally, this is what the Christian Church did.
The punishment of Mankind
The Original Sin is the reason Christians say that Human Beings experience suffering - as a result of Adam and Eve's actions. Genesis 3:16-19 describes some of the punishments in more detail. This is why all Humans die, because Adam & Eve disobeyed God.
Conclusions on the morals of the Adam and Eve story:
Punishing one person for the actions of another is immoral. If we use the Adam and Eve story to explain evil, suffering and death then we are saying that God is immoral and not a forgiving God. Judging Adam and Eve even when they didn't know the difference between good and evil, when they didn't know it was wrong to disobey and couldn't understand that the serpent tricked them, is also immoral. The Adam and Eve story is not a suitable moral story for children nor is it a valid theodicy to explain evil.
Some people argue that God must have created more people than just Adam and Eve. That the Bible doesn't say God only created Adam and Eve'. This defense is a valid defence against the incest problem associated with Adam and Eve.
"Adam and Eve had two children that we know of. Cain and Abel. When they grew up, Cain (or was it the other one?) went off and found a wife. Just where exactly did this woman come from?"It appears God must have created more than just Adam and Eve."Trouble in the Garden" by Adrian Barnett 1998
What does this mean in practical terms for the original sin? When did God create these people? It must have been:
If God created the extra people before the fall then are we led to believe that all the people God created also chose to eat from the Tree of Knowledge? This doesn't seem to make sense, because when Adam and Eve ate of it he appeared to them and told them off. God has quite a presence and it would no doubt be enough to scare off anyone else from eating from the tree! Either God let them all eat, knowing none of them had the knowledge required for them to distrust the serpent or to understand that disobedience was wrong, in which case God is an immensely poor parent. A parent knows that its children do not know not to touch a hot pan. So, parents warn their children not to. When their children go to touch the pan, the parent does more than just warn them. Because the parent knows that the child is not capable of understanding why not to touch the pan, the parent steps in and physically protects the child. God did not do this with Adam and Eve and anyone who was around: God did not protect its children from the danger. God is a bad parent.
God must have created the extra people after the fall. But this seems to be wrong. Because that would mean that God was creating imperfect people who were not the children of Adam and Eve. People who are not the children of Adam and Eve would not suffer from death or disease (which are the effects of original sin). So God created these extra people and created them with weakness to death and disease on purpose. If this is true, if God created these people like that, then original sin doesn't explain death and disease as these people were not subject to the original sin.
The explanation that God created more people than just Adam and Eve shows us that the Adam and Eve story is not a valid excuse for death "entering the world". God himself created death and the Adam and Eve story is merely apologetics on behalf of fearful God believers who wish to think of Humans as evil due to our own actions, and not due to Creation. The truth is, Human Beings were not created by an omnibenevolent God and the Adam and Eve story fails to reconcile God and evil, God is still immoral.
Creation of more people before the fall seems more likely
The criticism resulting from God creating people after the fall is less serious than that if he created them before. In the latter case we merely conclude that he is a bad parent, and perhaps not omniscient, whereas if he created people after the fall he is a downright immoral monster.
"Author Paul Alan Laughlin, a liberal Christian, drew an analogy between the story of Genesis 3 and "a more modern scenario." The following parable is based on his tale:
Remedial Christianity
by Paul LaughlinA woman bakes a batch of cookies for a party. She warns her twins, aged 3, to not eat any. She explained to them, deceitfully, that if they did, then she would kill them. Not thinking things through carefully, she placed the cookies on a table, easily accessible to the twins. A brother who was older, wiser and more mature than the twins asked whether their mother had forbidden them to eat anything in the house. The girl twin, Edna, said that mother had only forbidden them to eat the cookies -- on pain of death. The older brother chuckled and told his sister that parents did that a lot. He said: "Of course she wouldn't kill you. She simply wants to deny you the pleasure of munching on the cookies. She doesn't want to share the cookies. She wants to keep them all to herself." Edna does exactly what any adult could predict: she eats one. Then, she persuades her twin brother Albert to eat another.
The mother returns, not aware of the twin's disobedience. She notices crumbs on the table and on the twins' lips. She correctly concludes that the twins have eaten cookies. She flies into a rage, beats them, and throws them out of the house to fend for themselves. She cuts them out of her will. She does all she can to make the lives of any future descendents of the twins miserable."
By OCRT, "GENESIS 3: The fall/rise of humanity"
Any parent who acts like this lacks love, compassion, intelligence or morals, yet this is exactly how God acts in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. A possible Christian defence, in order to try and keep God as the good guy, would be that God then rectified the situation by sending his son out to retrieve his children. But this could all have been averted if God was simply a better parent in the first place!
Christianity subjected our culture to a particularly nasty brand of misogyny, included scripturally-based subduction of women which in part all derived from the story of Adam and Eve. Eve, in particular, was given immense blame and said to have caused all of womankind to be inferior, naturally inclined to sin, not to mention the further punishments God inflicted upon women according to the myth. However, some Christians (especially in the modern era) have disregarded these scriptural arguments and traditions.
“Some writers, such as the catholic convert Richard Carpenter, went so far as to argue that 'the greatest fault' should be attributed to Adam, since he was persuaded to disobey God by a mere mortal, whereas Eve had been deceived by the more formidable powers of Satan himself.”
"The Devil in Early Modern England" by Darren Oldridge, p92
Levi, Eliphas
"The History of Magic" (1860). Translation and Preface by Arthur Edward Waite, 1971, first edition of Waite translation was 1913. Eliphas Levi is the writing name of Alphonse Louis Constant. Published by Rider & Company, London, UK.
Oldridge, Darren
"The Devil in Early Modern England" (2000). Sutton Publishing Limited, England.
By Vexen Crabtree 2002 Sep 30
