The original sin

by onacruse 71 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  Frannie Banannie

  My question would mean that, regardless of such arguments, the basic premise of the whole "story" is illogical.

  You've had kids, right? Then you know what I'm saying: Would you slap your kids hands if they had just kicked the dog? Would you wash out their butt with soap if they had just said a bad word?

  Yes, I agree, Craig. It's illogical that any loving parent would even threaten death to their own child for wrongdoing, let alone an omnipotent deity who's supposed to be truth personified. The story and the reputed aftermath lends credence to a terrible megalomaniacal tyrant of a god. Oh, heck. I digress again.

  Okay. I'm going with the concept that the two actually went with their feelings about the knowledge they had gained from the fruit of the tree. This is what caused them to accept their biological differences and their covering of their differences was an acknowledgement of that acceptance.

  And let's face it. Fruit from any tree or plant only contains nourishment for the body. It's books (which are made of paper, which comes from a TREE) that impart knowledge. And books are also the fruit of trees.

  Frannie
• 

  Leolaia

  And how, within the Biblical parameters, would simply "being naked" be a deficiency? God created them that way to begin with! If all his works are perfect, then how could their "sudden awareness" of uncoveredness be a shame? or a sin? or a matter for God to even take further action and give them something more than fig leaves to achieve 'coveredness?'

  It's not a deficiancy, why would it be? The story is wholly etiological, only through reinterpretation does it become a "fall of man" narrative. The story relates how man acquires the kind of knowledge that distinguishes him as superior to the animals (knowledge "like the gods," as the text puts it). Animals do not wear clothes and have no shame about their nakedness. Similarly, children are not ashamed of their nakedness. Only when they grow up and acquire more adult knowledge that children learn that it is shameful to be naked. There is a distinct maturation theme in the Eden narrative, it is the story of how Adam and Eve grow up and leave the sheltered existence they had in Yahweh's care (where Yahweh provided for their needs). Notice also how Noah uncovers himself and becomes naked when he is in a drunken stupor (in ch. 9, also a Jahwist narrative); the wine undoes the shame and sense that a person would normally have.
• 

  journey-on

  May I jump in? This is one of the first questions I took to the elders many years ago. There were two trees in the garden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I wanted to know what God meant when after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, he had to post angels at the gates to the garden to keep them from going back in and partaking of the Tree of Life and "live forever." Also, why did they only notice their nakedness after they disobeyed by eating the fruit? Their ridiculous answer, or I should say non-answer, started me on my "search" for real truth. I was told not to speculate about such things. It indicated spiritual weakness!!! Unfortunately (or fortunately) I've always been a "speculator". I never forgot that humiliating experience. At the time, I was young and naive and my inquisitiveness was labeled as spiritual weakness. I fume when I think about it now.

  Without boring anyone with my "beliefs" about it, I'll just throw this out there. How else could the One divine intelligence who is in all, through all, and around all, instigate free will. I think it was his gift to man. It was the beginning of intelligent man's realization of cause and effect, thus the separateness of the human experience. Once they realized their disobedience, everything changed. A different vibration went forth into the universe and the concept of choice was born.....yes, duality! It's the nature of free will. Without it, our lives would be dull and boring. We would be nothing more than robots unable to progress. Without the pull of opposites and the choice to decide for ourselves, we are just copies in matter form of the divine essence. What happens when you do something naughty, something you were told not to do. You get a rush...an excitement, almost a sexual thrill. Perhaps this thrill of disobeying The Great One was evident and needed to be covered up (if you know what I mean). I hope this doesn't sound weird.
• 

  tetrapod.sapien

  hey JT!

  yes, i like the ideas that you pull from the narative. and joseph campbell too speaks of the narrative in terms of a coming and going from the "garden". the tree of knowledge on the way out, splitting our unified nature into two. and the going back, the tree of life, reunifying us into oneness. and of course, it would go without saying, that the reunification must address the alienation we experience on the "outside". the myth tells us that not only this must be strived for, but intuitively that it must also be possible.

  and this is why while i may rail against the literal interpretations, i still find the genesis myth of the fall as totally meaningful to us as humans metaphorically. and this is exactly what myths are to do. it's personally, for me, become a myth i would never want to lose rememberance of. though the myth is extremely old, it is still a subject for repitition in our lives. in each of our lives. we were all children at one time, living in magical harmony with our environment. at some point we became conscious and lost the magic, so-to-speak (possibly close to the point where nakedness becomes shameful to us?). same, imo, with early man at some point. a separation from our functioning unconsciousness, to the weird schitzoid world of self-consciousness.

  as jung says:

  Conscious fantasies therefore illustrate, through use of the mythological material, certain tendencies in the personality which are either not yet recognized, or are recognized no longer.

  - (the much revised 1952 edition of) Symbols of Transformation

  ...and i think that the original sin (fall) myth is a brilliant example of both. of what is no longer remembered, and what is yet to be remembered.

  tetra
• 

  onacruse

  Howdy, journey-on.

  No, your ideas don't sound "weird" at all. In fact, if you want "weird," it's what even got me to thinking about this again: a documentary I was watching tonight about Hitler, and the Oedipus complex. Now that's weird! LOL

  A few years ago, a good friend of mine suggested that I start researching topics along the lines of 'the Bible as history,' and, quite frankly, folks like Leolaia and tetrapod and JamesT (just to mention a couple that have posted to this thread) are a lot more competent than I at elucidating such matters.

  Frannie...I'm just ignoring her for the moment, 'cause she's trying to steal my .

  Craig
• 

  Madame Quixote

  Well, humans have more skin - less hair - than any other animal. They also sweat way more than any other creatures.

  Our skin and our nakedness (not to mention our B.O.) compared to other animals might be our original shame - our original "sin."

  We were just differerent from all the rest in that way, so maybe shame in our nakedness is the "sin."

  Makes the whole concept of original sin seem sillier and sillier, and yet more and more comprehensible to look at it from a drunken scientific perspective.
• 

  Madame Quixote

  on a cruse: "

  suddenly, humanity had alienated itself psychologically from its obvious and qualitative relatedness to nature, biologically.

  Granting that that might have been true for Adam and Eve, how could it be true for their descendants? What "qualitative relatedness" to nature was so utterly obliterated from the human soul by the actions of these two Biblical characters?"

  About 2 mya we became mostly hairless and our skin showed a lot more than that of most other mammals on the planet; so, eventually we came up with stories, like the Adam & Eve one, to explain our differences - our shame, our sin, our suffering.

  We did not realize then that the adaptations of, say dark skin, in some places helped minimize our suffering, while light skin, as an adaptation in other places, helped out, too.
• 

  Madame Quixote

  JT:"allowing the mind to dictate "reality" in a dualistic nature"

  JT, when that stuff was written, a couple thousand years ago, human kind was actively engaged in a dualistic lifestyle, constantly fighting the elements and beasts of the fields; and a couple million years ago when we realized we had skin instead of a bunch of fur, we were even more dualistically inclined.

  Nowadays, at least in westernized cultures, we can sit back on our verandas and pontificate on the false sense of duality, but then it was real - both to the writers and to the oral historians who probably originated one of the first Adam & Eve stories that eventually got written.

  Pardon my slackness; I am buzzed out.

  Tetrapod - it is interesting that you think of sin in terms of a pathological alienation from nature. Maybe that is the other side of the dualism coin. Maybe pathology is extreme, but it seems to me an accurate assumption, if what the scientists from the global warming summit say is true, and I think it is . . .Maybe eating the apple really always symbolized exploitation and overuse of earth's resources; even ancients could have figured out the problems that entailed (and many anthropological sites seem to attest to it); maybe the "eating," (as in overeating - gluttonous use of natural resources), is the sin after all?

  Isn't gluttony one of the 7 deadly sins?
• 

  bernadette

  Hi onacruse

  I'm also kinda looking at things from the perspective of tetra and jt.

  Madame quixote you raised an interesting very pertinent point.

  Cos the non hairy humans would have viewed the hariy animals as game and food eventually. So I wonder how that transition of once being one of 'them' and then killing - what one once was- impacted on their sense of alienation too.

  there must have been a time when humans started to see themselves as humans and not as animals. Human culture must also have started to develop with all of its ramifications.

  So for me the nakedness aspect has something to do with the furriness and non furriness issue as it developed

  bernadette
• 

  bernadette

  Hey onacruse

  just had a moment from needproof's topic 'Isn't it amazing how Christinas ignore the OT'

  Animal sacrifices and appeasement - that fits too with the alienation - what we once were and now what we are. The Cain and Able story too. wow.

  Don't know if I'm making sense. Somebody pls help