Philosophy Now Forum

marjoram_blues wrote: ......
So, right away we have the writers warning everyone against exploring the real world for answers not found in the so-called Divine Word. Way to go.

Knowledge is power indeed.

Indeed: "G3:5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

This doesn't refer to curiosity; it refers to loss of innocence. The story is far older than Isreal; it probably came down through Sumer (as did the flood story) and the editors forgot to take out a couple of references to "gods" - plural.

Yet still there is the danger that educated young females are 'powerless' in the face of abductors or seducers.

That's why the god of Genesis subordinates Eve to her husband from that time on. The idea is: women may be smart, but you'd better not let them boss you around!

duszek - Sounds good but I have one minor point:

Unemployed men suffer from lack of structure in their lives.
Working regular hours seems to be a blessing for many people.

Back then, they had no idea how the industrial revolution would compartmentalize and regiment human labour, how dependent on bosses people would be made, or how much leisure would become available in the post-industrial era. We'll have to adjust to a different tempo, that's all.

Skip wrote:

marjoram_blues wrote: ......
So, right away we have the writers warning everyone against exploring the real world for answers not found in the so-called Divine Word. Way to go.

Knowledge is power indeed.

Indeed: "G3:5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

This doesn't refer to curiosity; it refers to loss of innocence. The story is far older than Isreal; it probably came down through Sumer (as did the flood story) and the editors forgot to take out a couple of references to "gods" - plural.

Yet still there is the danger that educated young females are 'powerless' in the face of abductors or seducers.

That's why the god of Genesis subordinates Eve to her husband from that time on. The idea is: women may be smart, but you'd better not let them boss you around!

duszek - Sounds good but I have one minor point:

Unemployed men suffer from lack of structure in their lives.
Working regular hours seems to be a blessing for many people.

Back then, they had no idea how the industrial revolution would compartmentalize and regiment human labour, how dependent on bosses people would be made, or how much leisure would become available in the post-industrial era. We'll have to adjust to a different tempo, that's all.

Don't know what they meant by "gods" since good and evil are made up terms. By "god" it was mostly salesmanship, trickery of the tongue to seduce. "as gods" but not quite gods. A true God would understand good and evil but only as illusions. Like I said before the knowledge Adam and Eve obtained was worldly halftruths, shitsureness about their beliefs of good and evil, unenlightenedness. It is this false awareness of false absolutes that perpetuates evil in the first place. For example equating sex and nudity with evil just furthers negativity, repressed emotions and delusion.

In the Sumerian belief system, there was a little clan of gods, but they were not so puffed-up as Big Omni of the modern fundamentalists. The translators and editors were a little sloppy in replacing the old gods with the new one. Knowledge is only the start of the Human Problem. There was another forbidden tree in the divine garden:

¶22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Eternal life must be kept exclusively for the gods. This is another idea the Christians later subverted. They turned it into their own version of heaven, so that man could be promised re-entry into the garden, and eternal life, if qualified. Of course, the catch is, they complicated and multiplied God's demands so that very few people could comply with all of them.

GreatandWiseTrixie wrote:

Blaggard wrote:

GreatandWiseTrixie wrote:I'm fairly sure the story was referring to enlightenment and the snake of ego. And the fruit represented materialism, de-enlightening all the people who crave earthly social treasures. "Look how silly they are, they are embarrassed of their natural bodies. They toil in the fields all day, believe in sin, yet kill each other and no longer feel satisfied from vegan food (the garden was described as vegan before the Fall of Adam.) Such a bunch of unenlightened dweebs."

Pretty much nailed it there. When you are right you are right.


Although it was not vegan or vegitarian as such.

It is of course a parable on free will, when any person chooses to eat from the tree of knowledge or "tree of good and evil" and gain mortality, he thus has free will hence forth, realises he is naked, although that is figurative speech as well as being literally true; although all part of allegory; he or she then loses immortality, loses the right to be perfect, and understands hence good an evil and the choices a man or woman might have; such as Angels and God possess the knowledge of it but are perfect and hence have no need to have or gain free will such a state no Angel needs or has.

For all it is worth, that is pretty much what the story is about. God telling x not to do something y or x exercising hence their ability to chose to defy it under the influence of the serpent, often portrayed wrongly in fact as Satan by Christians, the serpent is simply an allegorical premise in a story that shows the will and its freedom and the temptation all freely willed people might feel, in a parable that is not strictly true or factual.

It simply says, man was given free will, by God's will, if not by the serpents will, or else how does God create a world that is sensible or sensitive to logic?

It is simply an allegory, it is not meant to be taken literally like any Jewish allegory, it is meant merely to iterate a point.

Read it. Genesis chapter 1.

It is vegan. It's on the first page of the Bible, but it's not like most religious people bother to read, they just parrot what they hear in Sunday School. I knew a woman with an IQ of 176 who claimed to be Christian but didn't actually know what was in the Bible. This is the type of knowledge and ignorance they are talking about in the metaphor.

By knowledge they mean a type of delusion, the type of delusion the world has by perpetuating ignorance through knowledge, false knowledge. It is clear that adam and eve already had knowledge and intelligence because they were able to communicate with each other prior to the fruit. God made the world vegan. It's this same knowledge that causes Christians to go around on their little crusades, persecuting whomever they please, vegans, homosexuals, non-believers, Jews, transsexuals, poor-people, sinners, intelligent people, socially awkward people, heretics, whomever the Christian wishes to antagonize with their so called knowledge. To be Christian means to be not Christian. To be religious means to be not-spiritual.

Yeah you kind of missed the point and are placing modern values on an ancient tale for ancient people. As for vegetarian and vegan well perhaps, it is really nothing to do with the story though.

Adam and Eve had knowledge of course, but because they lived in a perfect state and desired nothing, did they have free will? Is the entire point of the story, their casting out from Eden is inevitable, no person who is immortal, never feels hunger or desire can never taste death and never has any sort of inclination to know more, can hence obviously never have any sort of free will. it is necessary to know of good and evil, it is a consequence that they by knowing of good and evil one comes to know of death; it is necessary to experience desire without it you are perfect, immortal and lacking any sort of compulsion, perfection has no desire, it has no will. It's a simple story but a lot of people try to place values on it which simply don't exist. God gives a gift even he does not possess as such if you follow the logic, nor did or do his angelic hosts, nor will they ever have a need to. Mankind however does and must be able to grow as he wilt or he is little but a slave. There is no good without evil, there is no life without death per se, their is no desire without will. Simple concepts for a more simple time, and a more simple people.

Man is given free will by God as he always intended, but the means he goes about it are not exactly obvious.

An IQ of 176 means shit.

To put it in even more simple terms the Judaic tradition used allegory to create understanding rather than just dictating to people what they should think. In that way an often enslaved, often itinerant, sometimes illiterate people could be made to learn more easily. The Bible is hardly a historic text or even particularly accurate even its Gospels. But it is a record of his story, as imperfect as it may be if not history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mpxMZWuulk

Ahhhhhhhh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q-DO6Bav4I

Ahhhhhhhhhhhmen.

Blaggard wrote: Yeah you kind of missed the point and are placing modern values on an ancient tale for ancient people. As for vegetarian and vegan well perhaps, it is really nothing to do with the story though.

Adam and Eve had knowledge of course, but because they lived in a perfect state and desired nothing, did they have free will? Is the entire point of the story, their casting out from Eden is inevitable, no person who is immortal, never feels hunger or desire can never taste death and never has any sort of inclination to know more, can hence obviously never have any sort of free will. it is necessary to know of good and evil, it is a consequence that they by knowing of good and evil one comes to know of death; it is necessary to experience desire without it you are perfect, immortal and lacking any sort of compulsion, perfection has no desire, it has no will. It's a simple story but a lot of people try to place values on it which simply don't exist. God gives a gift even he does not possess as such if you follow the logic, nor did or do his angelic hosts, nor will they ever have a need to. Mankind however does and must be able to grow as he wilt or he is little but a slave. There is no good without evil, there is no life without death per se, their is no desire without will. Simple concepts for a more simple time, and a more simple people.

Man is given free will by God as he always intended, but the means he goes about it are not exactly obvious.

An IQ of 176 means shit.

To put it in even more simple terms the Judaic tradition used allegory to create understanding rather than just dictating to people what they should think. In that way an often enslaved, often itinerant, sometimes illiterate people could be made to learn more easily. The Bible is hardly a historic text or even particularly accurate even its Gospels. But it is a record of his story, as imperfect as it may be if not history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mpxMZWuulk

Ahhhhhhhh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q-DO6Bav4I

Ahhhhhhhhhhhmen.

Interesting theory, except there is no such thing as free-will. This particular Bible story has been a source of agony for me, as Christians use it to promote their delusions of free-will being a real thing, as well as promote meat-eating, despite God's Garden of Eden being described as a vegan utopia.

It's not a theory it is just what the Jews meant to convey to other Jews in ancient times.

Theory my fucking ass, get real.

There's no such thing as free will carries nothing to an itinerant often dispossessed and even enslaved Jew, and says nothing about the Adam and Eve story in context, the premise is God give man free will, there isn't anything else to it. Your modern wrangling on whether free will exists or ever could are beside the point dude. It says what it says, stop trying by sophistry to force it to say something else. They meant what they meant, you are probably worse than all the other Christians who thought it mean something it did not, if you insist in telling everyone what it means to you out of context like some gibbering ape. Context is key 2600 years ago it meant a lot to itinerant peasants, unfortunately 2600 years later or so all sorts of morons have made it into something it was never meant to be. The Christians at least have an excuse what is your excuse for dumb sophistry? It means this 'cause I say say so, does it does it fucking really? No I think not.

If you want to dicsuss whether free will exists fine, it doesn't it does who cares, but that is not the matter in question.

And for a start the whole vegan vegitarian thing has abso fuckinglutley nothing to do with Genesis, it just seems to be some odd thing you have forced on it because you like meat or not or who cares. Stick to the subject mate. If you want to start a topic on why man has no free will do so, or vegetarian or vegan do so. but such concepts are not relevant to the OT.

Where does the Eden story say anything about " free will "? That simply wasn't an issue for the Sumerians. The original story-tellers assumed choice and limits. In one version, the pair of humans is kept as pets, protected and provided-for and expected to obey the rule: Don't touch those two trees.*
But the xtian editors didn't remove the contradiction with another version, since in Chapter 1, they were both male and female to begin with (no rib) and told to "multiply and fill the earth".

The whole free will nonsense was made up much later, when a single god was promoted to Master of the Universe, whereupon people began to ask, "Well, if He made everything, why did He make Evil?" Which is a quite reasonable question. So the apologists respond: "He wanted you to have a choice, so He could reward you doing Good." None of this is in the old creation myth.

By the way, these " itinerant and often enslaved peasants" [Jews] are also invaders and conquerors who take other peoples' land, murder the enemy during a truce and abduct the young girls. Well, what tribe doesn't have its ups and downs?

The whole free will thing, it's all it was ever about.

All it ever was, and all it ever meant to be, you should read that shit some time, the whole original sin shit was just an invention by bored Xtians.

You have to I think understand that xtians were trying to make more of the simple idea that God in his infinite mercy and wisdom would allow people to think for themselves. Of course that was an anathema to most Christian dogma, people thinking for themself, having freedom to do what they want, outside the Church, the horror..? And hence you get all this bullshit about it being about a woman's sin, a persons sin an original sin, that simply is a a load of ass cake. The original sin was yes man or woman knowing what good and evil are hence gaining knowledge and hence having the ability to choose between good and evil; all this, women bleeding from their vaginas thing was tacked on by masogynists, the church and who knows who and for simply the purpose of control.

It wasn't a later invention to tell them they were free to chose between good and evil ie having free will, and it was hence the penalty man kind paid in being hence therfore from that time mortal, it is though simply what they meant at the time to the Jews of that time. You have free will now, you hence gained mortality which Adam and Eve did not have, desire or yearnings which they did not have, you are no longer in a state of perfection, I your God give you free will and the right to come to me through good, or not. It's not rocket science this shit.

Why the xtians had to layer shit cake after shit cake of bullshit on it is anyone's guess. Stick a cherry on that cake you have a bullshit cake with a cherry on top.

It was simply an issue for the Sumerians, yeah alright, mate. Pull the other one It's got bells on.

Gen 2: 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

That suggest he didn't want them to know.