Plato's Playground
your resolution doesn't seem to have held completely. as another member of this blog i have considered how i might re-enter the dialogue, but have as yet no idea how to discuss myths (oooh, there i go being a bit snarky) in which people choose to invest their belief. i suppose one goes to church with the god one has and not the god one might wish for. (thank you mr rumsfeld).
i find it easier to judge others, and myself, by our actions. surely we can find some broad agreement about the morality or ethicality of what we actually do without squabbling about who has the better motive.
here's an idea that may be controversial.....maybe the snake was a she.
Well, I don't suppose the snake's gender matters much to the story, but I don't know enough about ancient Greek and Aramaic to know if that is possible.
Anyway, my purpose here is not to trash the Bible, or believers, but to try to engage with it as a realist. If we start to read it without making any assumptions about divinity, and authority, what do we really find? What do the words on the page actually mean? Do they make sense? What morality do they seem to promote? What world view? I just plan to let the chips fall where they may.
I'm pretty sure there is more to this story, but my take on this part of Genesis is all about puberty, about the loss of childhood innocence when one gains carnal knowledge. Seen that way, the snake becomes a metaphor for the male member.
Also in this way, good and evil are not about right and wrong as we commonly think of them, but about sexual knowledge and practice.
BTW, isn't the serpent supposed to be Satan?
Thus evil is about following the ways of physical and sensual pleasures rather than shunning such things for higher purpose.
Just a few thoughts.
Could be seen that way, I suppose. But the metaphor of losing innocence by growing up and discovering one's sexual organs doesn't really seem to fit with the idea that God didn't want it to happen, and then gets angry when it does. After all, puberty and sexual reproduction are just part of the creation, not a sin.
And, the serpent cannot be Satan because, as we are about to see, God curses him and consigns him to crawl on his belly. He's a real snake alright.
When you get to the part about childbirth being made painful for women, let's get back to this.
Oh, I forgot, it was after they ate from the tree that they knew they were naked and made fig leaf aprons to wear to hide their nakedness.
I know there are huge problems with this story in both logical and practical inconsistencies, and there is a lot going on about authority, obedience, and man's dominion over all things of the earth.
But the greatest factor about the knowledge of good and evil is about sex for when they eat of the fruit and their eyes are opened they knew themselves to be naked rather than obtaining any actual wisdom.
To me, this is why the Christian Right places such great emphasis on sex as the entire basis of morality. Unfortunately, they only know themselves to be naked and nothing else and thus their ethical development remains arrested in adolescent prurience. This is the very heart of what is wrong with them and for every Christian that never matured enough to understand the teachings of the New Testament.
It is also here, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that begins the teaching of "original sin." Exactly what that "sin" was is never really examined. Even the Catholics have steered clear of explicating it favoring instead to argue about the nature of "hereditary stain" rather than the actual "sin of Adam."
As I am wont to look at such things, I'll post on that later.
Thanks Neo, I think you're right, most people have a general idea that eating the apple was somehow a sin and it has something to do with loss of innocence, but it's a very vague impression. When you actually look hard at the story, it doesn't make sense in moral terms at all.
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