"Atheists Killed >140 millions" is Fallacious

[nemos]

... Maybe little, maybe much, depending on what God had revealed to them...

You can talk as much as you want about the fact that and how hot the fire is, but until you are burned, you will not be able to understand the meaning of these words.
How exactly could God make Adam and Eve understand what death is, because words alone would hardly be enough, experience is needed?

An example of how "evil" turns into good:
Getting a child to burn themselves is not good, but if it is done in a controlled way with the intention of teaching them to be careful - then that is exactly what is needed.

Evil intentions turn good things into evil.
Good intentions can turn bad things into good.
And yet, do good intentions really pave the way to hell?

[Age]

... Maybe little, maybe much, depending on what God had revealed to them...

You can talk as much as you want about the fact that and how hot the fire is, but until you are burned, you will not be able to understand the meaning of these words.

For example no matter how many times a child, 'That is hot', then will not fully comprehend and understand what you actually mean.

That is; until they touch it.

And then they will learn, comprehend, and understand.

See, just like all children, who, Truly, learn, by their own experiences, and mistakes, so to do you adults keep continually learning, by your mistakes.

In fact how you human beings best learn, or learn best, is by your very own mistakes. And, this is why you were, and are, left to your own devices, as some would say here.

One of the biggest parts of 'the plan', so that all can, will, and actually do, end up living in peace and in harmony together, as One, was for you human beings to be left so that you can, and will, learn from your own mistakes. you can and do learn more by and through your own mistakes, and having True 'free will', which is just having the ability 'to choose', allows you all to learn best from your own, chosen, mistakes.

So, that eventually 'we' could all live together, happily, as One.

How exactly could God make Adam and Eve understand what death is, because words alone would hardly be enough, experience is needed?

An example of how "evil" turns into good:
Getting a child to burn themselves is not good, but if it is done in a controlled way with the intention of teaching them to be careful - then that is exactly what is needed.

But no matter what absolutely any one does, a child will still 'want to touch, and experience,' for themselves.

Which, again, by 'this mistake' is how they 'best learn'.

Evil intentions turn good things into evil.
Good intentions can turn bad things into good.
And yet, do good intentions really pave the way to hell?

[bahman]

He doesn't say that, actually. His lie is more subtle. It's that he calls into question God's motivation for prohibiting Eve from getting knowledge that there are such things as good and evil. He tells her that she will "be like" God, if she knows these things.

And in one sense, that's actually true: God does know what the difference between good and evil is; but where the Tempter lied is when he said, "You shall not surely die." That much is a plain lie.

But Eve did not need to believe the lie. She could have believed God, instead. But she didn't. As we saw, she had her own reasons for preferring what she was hearing. And that's why her choice was not just a choice of a fruit, but rather a decision to sever her own choice from God, and thus to rupture her formerly benign relationship with God.

He certainly said that you won't die if you eat the fruit opposite of what God said.

You didn't read carefully. Look above: I wrote, "...where the Tempter lied is when he said, "You shall not surely die." That much is a plain lie."

Pretty clear, no? Pretty hard to misread, if one was reading at all.

So you agree that the Serpent lied?

[promethean75]

"She had already been told, by God,"...for in the day you eat of it, you shall shirley die." - IC

"Eve and Adam were the first people, what exactly did they know about death? Did they bury someone while living in paradise?" - nemos

Boom.

Also, in addition to being unable to know what is meant by 'death', god never said eating from the tree was 'wrong'.... nor did he make explicit that doing so would be an act of disobedience. He merely says 'you're gonna die if u do".

Isn't this fun tho. Picking apart and quibbling over some stupid half-baked myth that has absolutely no relevance in the world except as an example of what not to pay any attention to.

[Wizard22]

You get to choose from ten choices!

...all of them are mistakes. But hey, at least you get to choose!

And you can choose two if you're on good behavior!

[promethean75]

Wait a minute u guys. There is only indirect evidence of apple cultivation in the third millennium BCE in the Middle East, where the garden of eden is believed to have been.

But this was waaaaay after homegirl was said to have eaten the apple.

how do u like them apples?

[iambiguous]

https://youtu.be/gqHRz6SrfiA?si=DPYH9H-PhmJ4Ux2s

[promethean75]

False alarm. Nothing is said about an apple, only that it was a fruit. My bad.

Still tho, don't get all excited and be like oh thank god it wasn't an apple. It must all be true then!

No. Snakes don't tell naked women to eat fruit from trees that god's warn them not to. It just doesn't happen.

[Age]

"She had already been told, by God,"...for in the day you eat of it, you shall shirley die." - IC

"Eve and Adam were the first people, what exactly did they know about death? Did they bury someone while living in paradise?" - nemos

Boom.

you seem to say this like "adam" nor "eve" had ever seen/experienced the 'death' of any other animal nor plant, previously.

Also, considering the story here is about the when human beings were created into existence, through an evolutionary period, after, or at, an awakening, where one species evolved into another. So, experiencing and/or knowing 'death' could have very easily and very simply occurred, previously. That experience of 'death', however, would have obviously of just not been of a human being, yet.

Also, in addition to being unable to know what is meant by 'death', god never said eating from the tree was 'wrong'.... nor did he make explicit that doing so would be an act of disobedience. He merely says 'you're gonna die if u do".

Isn't this fun tho. Picking apart and quibbling over some stupid half-baked myth that has absolutely no relevance in the world except as an example of what not to pay any attention to.

Said, while paying attention to 'it'.

[Age]

False alarm. Nothing is said about an apple, only that it was a fruit. My bad.

Still tho, don't get all excited and be like oh thank god it wasn't an apple. It must all be true then!

No. Snakes don't tell naked women to eat fruit from trees that god's warn them not to. It just doesn't happen.

Here we can see another example of when one takes the words of others literally, but who also complain when others take their words literally.

A great deal of the words used in the bible were used to symbolize other things.

The words used in religious literature were done in a seemingly puzzled way so that only when human beings had evolved enough, and thus ready and prepared to move along and up to the next stage and level of evolution, then, and only then, what was clearly said, and meant, would be clear, and understood.

[Dubious]

The Garden of Eden story has correspondences with the more modern Faust drama in its will to power through knowledge. The brain, at first soporific, not knowing itself and the fact that it can know, was subject to an awakening through the serpent, a manifestation of the unconscious, yielding to a mandate of its own in becoming aware, sacrificing blissful ignorance to the uncertainties of what knowledge and new revelations may reveal.

If taken literally, the story is miserably absurd, opposite to its metaphor and symbolization. It makes god (Yahweh) look like a total dumbfuck in supplying a brain to a being whose urge to know must eventually become manifest but forbidden to use in creating his own destiny beyond fertilizing the garden with his own poop.

I don't believe the story was ever meant to be taken literally by its creators, but an intentional metaphor to symbolize the initial conditions by which humans made the breakthrough to became sapient. The brain like the earth itself manifests its own occasional super volcanoes changing everything in its wake.

[bahman]

Duhh, it is very quiet when IC is offline. Nothing to discuss!

[promethean75]

"I don't believe the story was ever meant to be taken literally by its creators, but an intentional metaphor to symbolize the initial conditions by which humans made the breakthrough to became sapient."

I'd say it was meant to be taken literally but only becuz the authors of those stories had no other way of understanding their origins. They had no knowledge of evolutionary theory, and also found themselves among other animals that weren't nearly as complex as themselves (language and tool users). So, they made the inference; we have some other kind of origin than these animals.... or... we were once like these animals but something changed us.

Sexual shame also plays a central part in that eden story. I reckon what happened was, since even in the most primitive societies there was a lotta drama among the group when it came to males selecting females for sexy time, the first major conflicts evolved that engendered feelings of shame, resentment, envy and the like. So they made the equivocation; our perverse nature resulted from our becoming self-aware... which was the result of whatever made us much more complex than the other animals around us.

Really that eden story is about human beings coming to the realization that they're all pervs and feeling ashamed of that. They had to come up with some way of explaining that and avoiding the conclusion that that's all they are. So they must have 'fallen' somehow, must have been tricked by something evil, must have been originally perfect but screwed up an became a buncha pervs.

And naturally they made the whole thing the female's fault. It was the first instance of bros before hos in history.

[nemos]

...They had no knowledge of evolutionary theory, and also found themselves among other animals that weren't nearly as complex as themselves (language and tool users) ... It was the first instance of bros before hos in history.

Should it be understood that before the Christian belief in the one God, the Garden of Eden and all that follows from it, there were no people - neither American Indians, nor Romans, nor ancient Greeks, nor Vikings, nor Celtic or Germanic cultures?
How did they deal with the same problem of shame or any other biblical problem...?

Of course, the entire history of human culture is permeated by smaller or larger conflicts and wars, but the theory of a single god did not change much - any power manifests itself in violence, not necessarily physical, but physical also as the final argument. And any force like a magnet attracts the sick with a lust for power. Society is only as sick as sick are its members.

[Immanuel Can]

How exactly could God make Adam and Eve understand what death is, because words alone would hardly be enough, experience is needed?

One thing they had plenty of is experience with God. They knew who He is, and all the good He had already done for them. If He said to them, "Don't do X," do you think they remained really in any doubt about what they should do? Surely not.

An example of how "evil" turns into good:
Getting a child to burn themselves is not good, but if it is done in a controlled way with the intention of teaching them to be careful - then that is exactly what is needed.

I'll be sure not to let you babysit my kids.

No, evil doesn't 'turn into' good. It stays evil. But sometimes, good overcomes evil. In the case you cite, the parent takes a bad situation and employs it to the future advantage of the child, maybe; but that doesn't make burning children into an inherently good action, obviously -- nor would we regard a parent who deliberately burned a child -- even to "teach her a lesson" as a "good" parent.