How was Adam Perfect? He sinned....Duh

by DS211 28 Replies latest jw friends

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  DS211

  Well an elder brought this up with me and said he didnt understand how Adam sinned if he was perfect. I said i dont see how he couldve sin ed if he was perfect....but he had free will to CHOOSE. I then told him that i thought if God wanted us to obey him the worst thing he could do was create us to have free will.....a side thought i had was:

  Why is it independent thinking is the Devil if God was the one who created us with freew will in the first place.

  Next we discussed why God punished the serpent.....if Satan just utilized the snake to deceive Evie....So after many jumps through hoops and what the Society offers as speculation we canned it....i felt as though he was baiting me so i refrained from asking him if it was possible that it was symbolic. The. In conversation about Satans Plan for eves deception i added: Well he did tell the truth in that she would know Good and Bad and Be just like God....

  he agreed but said it was how he made her doubt and go against God that was the deception. I let it Go at that.

  Overall i felt good after, although throughout i had to hold my tongue as he standardized everyone as Deceived by Satan and blah blah While i connected the dots on how the org is very similar to pharisees and all that.

  Last thing: at one point the elder said "We all need control of some kind in order to fight against Satan"......i couldnt help but smile at this rationale for why the org controls us....Oh Jehovahs visible organization is great indeed.
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  AndDontCallMeShirley

  The other point JWs seem to miss is this:

  Satan, according to the story, already failed his own test, his use of free will. Why would it be necessary for god to allow the same experiment to be done on Adam and Eve, humans being lesser than spirit creatures? Certainly, god being omniscient, could see ahead of time where that was going....

  So, whether it's spirit or human creation, apparently god hard-wired them both to sin....in fact, the very thought of sin is a sin....
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  DS211

  Doesnt make much sense unless it is symbolic...For example the GB tells us that basically the serpent was cursed to slide on the earth and eat dirt (evidenced by the flickering of the snakes tongue for guidance) because it represents Satans Fall from high stature to lowly dickhead.....and yet they STILL claim the event is literal.....i have a feeling there are one or two things going on...the elder has doubts and is a deeper thinker than i thought (hes super smart) OR hes MOST likely baitinge to disclose my own doubts since i e missed so many meetings....
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  adamah

  The Jews (remember the guys who WROTE the story?) didn't conceive of A&E as perfect: that's a later Xian interpretation added to the account in order to justify Jesus' atonement for Adamic sin.

  Instead, Jews conceive of the first pair as fallible (and NOT perfect), and God even intentionally made humans with an inclination for evil and good (Hebrew word is 'yetzer'). That explains WHY Eve was able to experience and cave in to her 'desire' (AKA covet, a violation of the later 10 commandments) to eat the forbidden fruit EVEN BEFORE she disobeyed, and the same applies to Adam's disobedience.

  That elder didn't try that lame apologetic of "God didn't want to create robots who HAD to love and worship him, so He created Adam with freewill" spiel, did he?

  If he's as sharp as you say, you might enjoy watching him squirm and witness his brain go into seizure by humbly asking him to help you understand a discrepancy you noted, called "the Paradox of Adam and Eve" (which the NWT tries to bury, deliberate mistranslating the word 'wisdom'), as discussed in the following article on my blog:

  http://awgue.weebly.com/the-paradox-of-adam-and-eve-and-how-the-new-world-translation-fruitlessly-attempts-to-keep-it-hidden.html

  Adam
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  DS211

  Adamah--Good point...you always remind me to think of what the history shows people believed back in the good ole days.

  Gen 2: 7 And Jehovah God went on to form the man out of dust from the ground and to blow into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living person. 8 Further, Jehovah God planted a garden in E′den, toward the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 Thus Jehovah God made to grow out of the ground every tree that was pleasing to look at and good for food and also the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and bad.

  So the tree was already called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil/bad.....So the serpent didnt lie when it "spoke" about what its prospects were....not only that werent himans created "in gods image"? So he didnt lie when he said wed be like God.......He knew we were imperfect...This free will gave us the ability to appreciate and long for, love, have passion for our environment and yet all suffering (except natural disasters o course) is inflicted by free will right? Cause the demons cant read our thoughts....

  the more i spin the the more crazy i feel.
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  DS211

  He kond of gave me the spiel adamah but he was genuinely confised by it....just like he said the one thng he doesnt get is why God allows suffering
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  adamah

  Just recheck you understanding of the difference between "free will" and "freedom of choice" (as discussed in the article). It's one of the few points which the WT and Awake! managed to get right, and it's crucially important to know why free will doesn't apply to "God didn't want to make robots, who HAD to obey Him" thing, since Adam violated the ONE law recorded in the Bible, so "free will" doesn't even apply.

  So the tree was already called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil/bad

  At least it did what it said on the tin, so God cannot be accused of 'false advertising'.

  There's also the element of the fruit bestowing WISDOM to the eater, so the implications gets even worse, since it suggests the pair were created by God LACKING wisdom, and thus created them as fools (the Bible's antonym of 'wise' is 'foolish', where merism is used throughout the Bible, esp in Psalms, to indicate polar opposites; another example is the Tree of Knowledge of GOOD and EVIL, the tree that bore the forbidden fruit). WORSE, he forbade them possess wisdom (at least, not without asking "pretty please", as King Solomon later did, in a dream as a young man).

  Jews had NO PROBLEM with a God who created mortals as fools, and intended them to stay that way (hence the ONE prohibition they were given). The "eyes were opened" bit reflects a self-awareness of the moral issues they were surrounded by, but remained ignorant and oblivious about.

  The awareness of nakedness is a frequently-encountered metaphor used in Genesis, referring to feeling exposed to the World after realizing they had no moral code, no system of laws to live by (the same concept lives on today, in speaking of one's being EXPOSED to liability). Noah's nakedness is the same; his son was cursed for exposing Noah's shortcomings, after God had delegated the responsibility to "righteous" Noah.

  Of course, it's all a story reflective of ancient morality, but it's amazing that those who take it literally seem the ones most blocked from using bog-standard literary analysis techniques to understand what is an elegant story, but hardly bears the hallmarks of being of Divine origin.

  Adam
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  Comatose

  Does god have free will or is he a robot?

  Would a JW say god could do bad? Answer = No

  So if god has free will but can't do bad or wouldn't do bad, then why didn't he make angels and man like that?

  it doesn't make sense.
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  adamah

  Comatose asked-

  Does god have free will or is he a robot?

  In sin is defined as violating God's Divine Will, and God cannot sin, the answer is NO, God MUST follow his own Will. God is a robot.

  Also, God is said not to be "a man, who changes His mind", so God cannot change His mind. God is depicted as a robot.

  That all falls apart in Genesis 6, where God regretted making the Earth (AND humans AND animals), so wished He'd never made everything in the first place. Whoops.... God expressed Divine Will to create in Genesis 1/2, so God sins in Genesis 6 by working against His prior expressed Divine Will by making it rain. Whoops.... Continuity error.

  Furthermore, God enters into covenants with humans throughout the Bible, so that implys voluntary limits on his choices for those actions (or God violates the Covenant He made); thus God is not omnipotent, since God has some limits on the use of His power (eg after the Flood, God promised not to destroy the World with rain; that's a limit on His omnipotence).

  The reason none of this bothered early listeners of the Genesis account is they didn't really possess the critical-thinking skills that are common-place today, and even if they DID, they didn't have the CHOICE of beliefs to choose from. They'd be floored at the concept of choosing one's religion that we have today, since in ancient times you were BORN into your society with a mandated religion; as the OT shows, those who wanted to explore other religions were to be killed by their fellow worshippers (Exodus' account of Golden Calf of Ba'al worshippers is the obvious example). Eventually you see an evolution away from that kind of thinking, but it was a slow process (the early Xian church stamped out gnostics as false teachers, and the trend continues today in the WT's attitude to apostates).

  Adam
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  WTWizard

  The whole account proves that joke-hova wanted us to suffer. Making anything that comes naturally to human nature a "sin" that carries the death penalty was required for joke-hova to get any sort of compliance. Ascetism is what joke-hova is about. That thing wanted to use us for its own selfish purposes, and nothing else.

  Now, by extension, one could ask how could Satan have "sinned". Well, if Satan had compassion for us (something joke-hova never had), that made Satan superior to joke-hova. Satan acted on this compassion, doing what He could to get us out of that trap. This is similar to what happens at the supermarket when you see the lobster tank. The supermarket wants those lobsters for its own profit. Someone comes in with compassion for the lobsters, and contempt for the supermarket for abusing them. This person takes the lobsters out of the tank, brings them back to full health, and releases them in Penobscot Bay where they belong. The supermarket gets pxxxed, recaptures the lobsters for that tank, and jails the person responsible for releasing them. The lobsters are once again suffering--while the supermarket gets its tiny profit for abusing them. Worse, the supermarket comes up with a story about how the person that released the lobsters was the villain, and how much the supermarket loves the lobsters--and forces the lobsters to believe it.

  Now, Satan is the person that liberated us. Joke-hova is running the abusive "supermarket"--and we are not talking lobster lives here. This is HUMAN lives that joke-hova is tampering with. We were to be brought back to full health and released in "Penobscot Bay" by none other than Satan, where we could have lived in peace. But no, joke-hova hampered that release. That thing returned us to the cruelty tank in the "supermarket" it owns, and for what. So it could use us for its profit! And then it puts out lies about how Satan, who tried releasing us, was the real villain and joke-hova (the "supermarket" the savior. Bunk!