Of course it doesn't.Maria wrote:It doesn't make sense to cast them out for acting according to their natures.
Maria, Adam and Eve were not birds. They had intelligence, and they were fully able to understand what God said to them! It's all about disobedience. As Sir Dennis said, one little rule, just one, and they had to break it!Maria wrote:[If one has no sense of good and bad, then how can one be expected to understand about rules and the importance of not breaking them?It does seem like we were set up to fail. One explanation I heard recently is God plops you in paradise, gives you free reign and free will, but with one little rule. Then you break that rule. Who is the bad guy?
I had a pet bird up until last year () and he quite literally did not understand the concept of *not* doing what he wanted to do because it was "bad." A dog may break your rule, but will feel guilty about it. A bird seems to have no such process in it's brain. You can teach them not to do something if it results in danger to them, but you can't gently teach them to obey your rules because it's the right thing to do. If he got it in his head that he wanted to shred a particular item, he'd be back in that corner the minute your back was turned tearing away until you came back and shooed him away again.
That's what having no sense of good and evil is like. It seems to me that expecting a creature with no knowledge of good and evil to have any self restraint at all is illogical. And, in fact, gaining the knowledge of good and evil ought to improve their chances of following subsequent rules.
It doesn't make sense to cast them out for acting according to their natures.
I vote for residual cat worship, certainly.Your motives may be a complex blend of residual cat worship and Loonie Toons, but your intent is either to hurt the cat or to save the bird.
Fair points. But I fail to see where the question of good and bad (or evil) enters into a simple request for obedience (on only one point) to your maker. Clearly they were able to follow instructions. I grant that without a basis for comparison they might not have understood the difference between perfection and imperfection, nor what living outside of paradise might be like since paradise was all they knew. (Conversely we struggle today with the concept of perfection because we have no idea what it looks like.)Maria wrote:Good visuals. Kicking the cat seems downright gentle by comparison.
I could have sworn that was a common saying.... it was just meant to convey overreacting to a situation, not ax-murdering a pup!
If one has no sense of good and bad, then how can one be expected to understand about rules and the importance of not breaking them?It does seem like we were set up to fail. One explanation I heard recently is God plops you in paradise, gives you free reign and free will, but with one little rule. Then you break that rule. Who is the bad guy?
I had a pet bird up until last year (
That's what having no sense of good and evil is like. It seems to me that expecting a creature with no knowledge of good and evil to have any self restraint at all is illogical. And, in fact, gaining the knowledge of good and evil ought to improve their chances of following subsequent rules.
It doesn't make sense to cast them out for acting according to their natures.
That's sort of what I was trying in a very lousy way to get at. Any given society will have arrived, by some consensus, at what is good and evil. But how do you find common ground between those bubbles? We consider stealing evil, but how do you explain that to someone from a culture that doesn't share our concept of ownership? This is the problem with trying to get empirical over concepts like good and evil. It's not like, say, the concept of sharp, which can be defined in ways that transcend cultural barriers.axordil wrote: River--
There's some circularity lurking in there, re: defining what one sees as good or evil based on other things one has seen or heard of that are good or evil based on...unless it's less circular than it is a network function, where the participants determine via interaction with each other what the definitions will be. That's what I think society does, when it doesn't make an appeal to Authority.
A sort of... OK, I want these creatures to have free will, do they? 
Why?Pearly Di wrote:I only have time before I hit the hay (I.e. to go to bed) to make one point: it's not the fruit (the Bible never says it was an apple), it's what the fruit symbolised. The fruit was from which tree? - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God warns Adam and Eve not to eat from that tree for they 'shall surely die' - every other tree in the garden is available to them. The prohibition is mysterious: God must have his reasons for not wanting them to eat from that particular tree and the power of that knowledge it contains - presumably only he, the Creator, can handle that kind of knowledge. The lesson is, Adam and Eve should have trusted him.
That's pretty much how I see it.Maria wrote:Oh! Oh! Oh!
I think I understand what was going on with that creation story. It was a test! Not really a test of obedience which humanity failed... but rather a test of function!
And voila! Apples eaten, the humans are working as designed. Right, off you go! Wind 'em up and let them go.
That's always bothered me. Anything an omnipotent god wants to happen, happens. If people ate the apple against orders, then it was because they were supposed to!
People didn't fail that test. They passed it.
If, you know, any of this happened at all.
But it doesn't really address my big gripe with the story's presentation of god - why put the tree there to begin with? And why send the rebellious serpent to hang out with your new, innocent creatures?Pearly Di wrote:I only have time before I hit the hay (I.e. to go to bed) to make one point: it's not the fruit (the Bible never says it was an apple), it's what the fruit symbolised. The fruit was from which tree? - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God warns Adam and Eve not to eat from that tree for they 'shall surely die' - every other tree in the garden is available to them. The prohibition is mysterious: God must have his reasons for not wanting them to eat from that particular tree and the power of that knowledge it contains - presumably only he, the Creator, can handle that kind of knowledge. The lesson is, Adam and Eve should have trusted him.
Now you're catching on.axordil wrote:Because I said so, that's why. The battle cry of every beleaguered parent.
:DThis is an interesting observation. I've noticed, during the creation story, it says this:JewelSong wrote: In addition, there are two different stories in Genesis. The first chapter is a complete story in and of itself. God creates man and woman together, in God's own image, male and female (BOTH in God's image.) He plunks them in the garden and it's all good...
In other words God made man (not a man) and told them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.Then we come to the story of Adam and Eve.26Then God said, "Let us make man[h] in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
27So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
Frelga wrote:Vison, please recall that the Jews have been telling that story for some two thousand years before Christian theology settled on the "original sin" interpretation.
