Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 3:07 pm"Death" refers not just to instantaneous cessation of life, but to all things that tend that way, such as corruption, decay, pain, deprivation, loneliness, chaos, disruption, illness, and so on. The Bible teaches that when Adam "died" he did not do so instantaneously, in that he continued to live, walk around, and even to have children; but he was, from that moment of rejection of God, set on a path that leads down to death...the worst aspect of which is "eternal death" a form of unrelationship, where one confirms one's rejection of any connection to God for eternity, and receives what one has chosen.
Since neither Adam nor Eve actually ever existed, the story is a mythology, and as a mythology a great deal can be inferred from it, or overlaid on it. But since it is a Story, and no story is what the story is intended to refer to, but rather a set of allusions or propositions, we can, just as we consider and meditate on the Adam & Eve mythology, we can also see it as a story and thus as false.
I assert that a mature man will understand it to be false -- a contrivance, a vehicle if you will -- and that an immature man will cling to it as if it is *really real*.
The idea however that man is the author of his condition is one that has often been meditated on by different peoples, at different times, for the longest of times. The earliest Rishis of ancient India definitely confronted the entire issue. That is, the realization of the terrible facts about life in a physical, temporal body in a *world* where all those things you mention [corruption, decay, pain, deprivation, loneliness, chaos, disruption, illness] and of course final, painful death -- all these things were seen and grasped.
It therefore became necessary to try to understand
why all this was the way it was.
Why it was happening. And what sort of world this world was and why we are here. However, the consideration of these issues and questions did not begin with the Hebrews. In fact it could fairly be asserted that the Hebrews both borrowed and also distorted the ideas and teachings of other peoples and 'concocted' an ethnocentric and actually rather vicious and terrible tribal philosophy. If this is so, and if it is true that the same tendencies are still visible and recognizable in the Christian conception, then it becom es at that point obligatory to examine the stories themselves and the content of what is asserted in these stories.
That is, to state that they are not *real* in the sense of genuine histories or historical descriptions, but contrivances by a priest-class for whole sets of reasons. Again, I assert that that is the *mature man's* path. The *immature man* requires special examination.
If one believes that the ills of the world, the reality of the very nature of the natural systems that exist in our world, and likely in others, have been caused by those ur-humans, one is believing a rather stupid story. There is not other word but to say *a lie*.
The story that you believe in -- as if it is a real history! -- is the foundation of your interpretation of
world.
If the question becomes What is the best world-concept to apply to the world, to life, to real reality, then whole other dimensions of possibility open up. This has already begun and, as it seems, it will definitely not stop.
I guess I would say that *our purpose* or in any case our fate (!) is to exist in a time when this process is going on. The people you communicate with, here, are all in that process (though they did not choose it). It is something
that is happening to all of us.
