If I offended anyone in Part I, I apologize. I made light of the Adam and Eve story not to prove its inconsistencies and stretches of credibility, but to ease its historical significance and theological severity. In doing so, we see what does not make sense. I don’t always dismiss the fantastical. Like Fox Mulder, “At first, I’ll believe pretty much anything.” What I cannot believe, however, is that the Adam and Eve story is the literal truth and that this literal truth has any bearing on us today.
First, we must question the story by placing Adam and Eve in the natural world. The literalist defense would be: how can you question God’s ways? Easy, do it. How else can we achieve new understandings? When we talk of Original Sin, we’re not talking of the ways of God anyway, but of man.
By applying natural logistics to Adam and Eve, we hit the biggest obstacles. Of course, two people magically set in the natural world thousands of years ago could not populate said world. Never mind the mathematical improbability, and the unlikelihood of survival from predators, climate, and starvation. Never mind the Creationist claims that the world held no mortal peril before the Fall (and that we played with dinosaurs). Look at it from a historical and genetic point of view. Our species originated in Africa, not between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The OT’s desert farmers lived in that region for thousands of years. Sure, they traveled, but in the primitive mindset, like that of a child’s, the universe must revolve around their peoples and so mankind must originate from their land. How else to breed the fear of others and want of violence toward them if you don’t “other” them from the very beginning?
Okay then, genetics: as we’ve seen with Egyptian, French and English royalties, genetic diseases and abnormalities occur and progressively worsen over time with long-term incest. Adam and Eve’s ancestors would have had to experience these same abnormalities, as would Noah’s family after the Flood. Well, God didn’t make diseases while tending to the Garden. Okay, but he kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden to endure the toils of the world and then made genetic disease? Isn’t that more effort than is needed?
If Adam and Eve didn’t actually happen and all of it is merely a story, then what do we make of that story? Don’t, as I stress so often, dismiss it as bullshit. Look at it as literature:
Simply put, Adam and Eve is a story of aging. God represents parents, childhood, once-held beliefs. While he may be a creator, he is not Creator. He is the environment in which a person is born and bred. Adam and Eve are really one character, sexless, belonging to any demographic or ethnicity. They are a symbol for individual duality, Adam the satisfied part of human nature, loyal, content in his beliefs and knowledge. Eve is the part that reaches out for new understandings, is rebellious, skeptical. This is not because she is a woman, as religious authorities have preached. Without Eve’s thirst for knowledge and maturity, mankind as we know it, if you follow the story, would not exist. She is the dramatic thrust of the story, the dynamic character. It is not her “sinful nature” that gets mankind in trouble, but our desire to know that sometimes gets us into hot water with our families and social environment. How to prove this within the text? Like with religious dogma, it comes down to the talking snake.
The Tree of Knowledge represents maturity and doubt that comes with newfound intelligence, the harbinger of which is the serpent. When Genesis was written, snakes were not symbols of evil. They were symbols of wisdom and fertility. So, the talking snake is not Satan. That line of bull was devised centuries later by church authorities. The snake is Wisdom, fertilizing Eve’s desire to know, and pushing her to eat the fruit. By eating the fruit, Adam and Eve experience what most of us do when we realize the world is bigger than our parents’ backyard: our minds open. We question our environment (Eden) and God (Mom and Dad).
Mom and Dad don’t like being questioned, as it raises doubts within themselves (like how could God not know the serpent was there if he is omniscient?). They expel us from a paradise that, in our young lives, has soured. Yet, were we to return with love and respect, we would be gladly taken back into the fold. Look at God’s command to the cherub: in returning, Adam and Eve will no longer be who they once were. Age, knowledge, life struggles, etc., will change them into “other” people. If anything, the Adam and Eve story promotes, though God’s acceptance, the ever-changing nature of human beings as a natural, or even essential occurrence, not a source for guilt or atonement.
Though this interpretation is simple, it captures the crux of the story as I see it. Some of us, after reaching a certain age, shun how we were raised or what we were raised to believe, in favor of what we now see as a quest for truth. Some of us decide, in old age, to take solace in what we once held dear for an easement of doubt and the assurance of personal comfort. Again, this doesn’t apply to everybody, but what remains relevant is the consistency of human nature, our rebellion, expulsion, and return throughout time, within our own families and among friends.
Original Sin is an evil method of control by the church. In being made to believe we are intrinsically evil, we are sent into the world with a millstone already around our necks. Although the original writers of Genesis were trying to formulate explanations for the miracle of life, their intentions have been twisted by the doctrine of Original Sin.
In Part III, I’ll deconstruct Adam and Eve as a basis for this philosophy.
No comments:
Post a Comment