02 Jun '05 13:00>
There are some Christian teachings I can understand, but disagree with. But try as hard as I might, I just can't make head or tail of the Garden of Eden story as depicting a good God, from a moral perspective. It's like one of those damn Magic Eye pictures when you haven't got the hang of them. Which of the following lessons am I supposed to learn from the story?
- God is the boss, and you should do what he says. Don't listen to the Devil. Why are things this way? Answer: ignorant people don't ask questions. It sounds like you've been spending too long around the Tree of Knowledge!
- God gave people free will, so they could either choose to obey him or disobey him. But there's no pondering of difficult issues involved in doing the right thing: you either do it God's way or the Devil's way. It's like those experiments where they put a mouse in a cage and give it two buttons to press: by rewarding the mouse for pressing the green button and punishing it for pressing the red button, the mouse learns to press the green button. This is how you should view good and evil - there aren't many alternative actions, just a red button and a green button. And the green one is always the right one. The trouble is, if you press the red button, the green one vanishes from sight.
- If you obey God all the time, you don't need to trouble your little head with notions of right and wrong. Once you do that, you'll start thinking for yourself, which is bad because human thought is inferior to divine thought. Freedom of will is good, but God was distinctly nonplussed at the prospect of freedom of thought.
- Adam did just fine is the whole obeying God business until Eve was added to the Garden. If men stopped being unduly influenced by women, all would be well.
- Of course, unlike the usual experiment, once the mouse-er Eve presses the red button, she's failed the test and gets chucked out of the cage. At this point God decides that humanity is a bad mouse and puts the green button somewhere that's really hard to reach.
- God also gave Adam and Eve a kind of collective responsibility. We don't get the same choice as them today, because they made the choice for us. Because Adam + Eve sinned, we're all bad people from the day we're born.
-Childbirth and farming aren't difficult for practical reasons. God made them especially difficult, in order to make our lives worse. But it's not like such activity is salutary, in the sense of making people more likely to accept God. Quite the contrary - the nastiness of life on Earth seems to have the effect of making it harder for us to believe in a benevolent God.
- God is the boss, and you should do what he says. Don't listen to the Devil. Why are things this way? Answer: ignorant people don't ask questions. It sounds like you've been spending too long around the Tree of Knowledge!
- God gave people free will, so they could either choose to obey him or disobey him. But there's no pondering of difficult issues involved in doing the right thing: you either do it God's way or the Devil's way. It's like those experiments where they put a mouse in a cage and give it two buttons to press: by rewarding the mouse for pressing the green button and punishing it for pressing the red button, the mouse learns to press the green button. This is how you should view good and evil - there aren't many alternative actions, just a red button and a green button. And the green one is always the right one. The trouble is, if you press the red button, the green one vanishes from sight.
- If you obey God all the time, you don't need to trouble your little head with notions of right and wrong. Once you do that, you'll start thinking for yourself, which is bad because human thought is inferior to divine thought. Freedom of will is good, but God was distinctly nonplussed at the prospect of freedom of thought.
- Adam did just fine is the whole obeying God business until Eve was added to the Garden. If men stopped being unduly influenced by women, all would be well.
- Of course, unlike the usual experiment, once the mouse-er Eve presses the red button, she's failed the test and gets chucked out of the cage. At this point God decides that humanity is a bad mouse and puts the green button somewhere that's really hard to reach.
- God also gave Adam and Eve a kind of collective responsibility. We don't get the same choice as them today, because they made the choice for us. Because Adam + Eve sinned, we're all bad people from the day we're born.
-Childbirth and farming aren't difficult for practical reasons. God made them especially difficult, in order to make our lives worse. But it's not like such activity is salutary, in the sense of making people more likely to accept God. Quite the contrary - the nastiness of life on Earth seems to have the effect of making it harder for us to believe in a benevolent God.