Christianity and other forms of theism are full of oddities. This is the first of a series of posts pointing out the oddities and asking theists to explain how they understand, deal with, or rationalize these oddities.
Today’s question:
Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If they didn’t know good from evil until after eating the fruit, then they were punished for doing something they didn’t know was evil.
Does this make sense to you? If so, why?
StephenB and HeKS,
My interpretation of the Genesis story is far more straightforward than yours.
Consider:
1. Nothing indicates that Adam and Eve have knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the fruit.
2. God calls the tree “the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. Not the “tree of partial knowledge of good and evil”, or the “tree of enhanced knowledge of good and evil.”
3. Eve and the serpent call it by that same name.
4. Adam and Eve felt no shame at their nakedness before eating the fruit.
5. The serpent says, “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6. The moment they ate the fruit, Adam and Eve felt shame at their nakedness.
7. The moment that Adam expresses his shame at being naked, God asks ““Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
8. God says “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”
The straightforward and obvious interpretation: They didn’t know good from evil before eating the fruit, but afterward they did.
The two of you object to my interpretation not because it clashes with a straightforward interpretation of the text, but because it clashes with your religious beliefs — in particular, because it paints God in a negative light. You want to change the story so God looks better, and more like the God you believe in — but the text doesn’t support your strained interpretation.
This comment from HeKS is a good example of the problem:
But note that the conflict is not internal to the story, or to my interpretation of it. The only reason that HeKS sees a conflict there is because he wants to believe that God is good and just. The story doesn’t say that God is fair, but HeKS wants to interpret it so that it does. The conflict is of HeKS’s making.
God is quite unfair in the story. Not only does he punish Adam and Eve for something they didn’t know was evil, he also punishes the serpent for telling the truth!
None of this should be surprising. The God of Genesis is quite unlike the God most Christians believe in. He lies, he punishes unfairly, and he’s not particularly bright — characteristics that clash with what Christians believe about him.
KeithS
Yet all Biblical scholars disagree with you. For two thousand years, Christians and Jews have taught that Adam and Eve knew right from wrong. Is your interpretation more straightforward than theirs?
All of your talking points are based on the erroneous assumption that the word “knowledge” has only one meaning in Scripture. On the contrary, the “knowledge of Good and Evil” refers to A &;E’s experiential knowledge after the fall, which is different from their pre-existent knowledge of right and wrong before the fall.
We object to your interpretation because it stems from an incomplete knowledge base. You are not aware of subtle meanings that are lost when the Hebrew language is translated into Greek and then into English. And, of course, you are blissfully naive about context. Your “straightforward” interpretations lead you to strange places. You probably think that “Adam ‘knew’ Eve” means that Adam was acquainted with Eve.
Did any of you watch the Nova show called The Bible’s Buried Secrets on PBS last night?
Praise yahoo! (You’ll understand that if you watch the show.)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
Creodont2,
I didn’t, but I will. Thanks for the tip!
The Bible’s Buried Secrets
StephenB,
You are fighting tooth and nail against the text, trying to force it to mean what you want it to mean. Why not let the author speak for himself?
Let’s rerun the story with a slight change in order to show you how tendentious your interpretation is.
Suppose that there is a Tree of Invisibility in the Garden, and that God says “Don’t eat its fruit or you’ll die the same day.” The serpent says, “Don’t listen to him. You won’t die, but you will become invisible, just like God..” Adam and Eve eat the fruit. They immediately notice that they’ve become invisible, and they don’t die that day, just as the serpent predicted. God comes looking for Adam, and Adam yells “Over here, God. I’m invisible.” God says “Wait a minute. Did you eat the fruit of the Tree of Invisibility?” Adam confesses. God punishes A&E for disobeying him, and he punishes the serpent for telling the truth.
Then God says, “The man has become just like us — he’s invisible.”
I interpret the story in the obvious and straightforward way:
1) originally Adam and Eve were visible;
2) then they ate the fruit;
3) then they were invisible.
StuartC says, “No, they were always invisible. It’s just that after eating the fruit, they were invisible in a different sense of the word. Don’t you know that ‘invisible’ has many subtle shades of meaning?”
He adds “For 2000 years, believers in my tradition have held that Adam and Eve were always invisible. Who are you to disagree?”
Ponder how ridiculous StuartC’s interpretation is, and then take another look at the obvious and straightforward one:
1) originally Adam and Eve were visible;
2) then they ate the fruit;
3) then they were invisible.
StuartC is letting his religious beliefs blind him to the obvious meaning of the text.
So is StephenB.
Keith, since you are just repeating talking points that have already been soundly refuted, you might as well move on to part 2.
No counterargument, eh, Stephen?
keiths writes:
I was about to reply to HeKS previous comment to me in this thread, but keiths has summarized my position quite succinctly.
It appears that keiths and I are better at simulating biblical literalists than StephenB and HeKS. 😉
KeithS
Wow, what a disingenuous eruption! Of course, I have presented numerous counterarguments. Here are three of them for the record:
[a] All Christians and Jews interpret the author of Genesis to mean that Adam and Eve knew right from wrong. Only you interpret the author to mean something else. Hence, their reading is “straightforward,” and yours is “twisted.”
[b] The word “know” has many different meanings in Scripture. One must be aware of those differences to get the right interpretation. You are unaware of and uninterested in those differences.
[c] The meaning of the word “know” in the context of the Tree of Good and Evil refers to Adam and Eve’s experiential knowledge after the fall. Thus, one cannot apply that same meaning to their knowledge before the fall.
These points (and many others) totally refute your claims, so you simply ignore them. It’s no more complicated than that. I am confident that you and Patrick will continue this pattern of non-response throughout your series.
Out of interest, why do you suppose “And, given they already knew right from wrong they still……” is not there? Why does it have to be interpreted at all, why could the plain meaning just not be spelt out?
And given it has been interpreted on what basis are you taking your interpretation as the real meaning and on what basis are you able to speak for “All Christians and Jews”? If I put my Christian hat on for a moment, for twas how I was brought up, I can say that my interpretation is that they did *not* know right from wrong before they ate the apple.
So on that first point about *all*, you are wrong. Why can’t you also be wrong about the rest of it?
Patrick:
Ironically, even the literalists don’t read the Genesis story as written.
How many literalists will admit that God lied, while the serpent told the truth and got punished for it?
Patrick
It appears so only to you and Keith since all your errors are based on erroneous assumptions that I have already outlined and that you have studiously ignored.
Let’s begin with this one: How do you account for the fact that all Christians and Jews disagree with you about the meaning of the passages contained in their own bible? Who is more likely to know what the author of Scripture is saying–you or them?
I don’t think you can disagree with them about what they think the meaning of a passage, but I’d hardly go to a believer for an objective interpretation. Believers will interpret any passage in light of the imperative that it can’t be stupid or wrong.
But, of course, it can be both. If you don’t accept this regarding your own scripture, try stepping back and applying it to the Book of Mormon, or Dyanetics, or the Quran.
StephenB,
While I disagree with you, I’m glad to see you here participating in an open forum. Welcome.
Both keiths and I have covered that already. Believers don’t want their god to look bad. Punishing people who didn’t know right from wrong looks bad. Punishing the descendants of people who didn’t know right from wrong looks bad. Hence the need for apologetics.
The plain, literal meaning of the words does not support your position, no matter how many other believers you get on your side.
Hi Patrick.
I thank you for beginning to engage the issue, but you are not really getting to the crux of the matter. I will present the problem as concisely as I can:
Keith is not simply arguing that the author of Genesis is being misunderstood by all Christians and Jews, which is an incomprehensible stretch as it is, he is also arguing, incredibly, that the author misunderstands himself. In other words, Keith (and you) are claiming that the human author of Genesis wanted his readers to believe that God punishes people who don’t know right from wrong. That is what Keith means when he says we must respect the author’s intentions. He is saying the the author ‘intends” to tell a story that makes God look bad even though he doesn’t really want to make God look bad after all. The argument refutes itself.
At the same time, neither of you are, at least at this point, prepared to defend your claim against two well-known facts:
—–Scripture uses the word “knowledge” in a variety of ways. Among other things, that word can mean cognitive knowledge, experiential knowledge, or sexual intercourse. In this case, the passage does not claim that Adam and Eve gained cognitive knowledge of right and wrong after the fall. It claims that Adam and Eve gained experiential knowledge of Good and Evil after the fall. You are conflating the former with the latter without knowing the difference..
—–Adam and Eve could not possibly have understand God’s command to not eat of the Tree of Good and Evil without first having had a pre-existent knowledge of morality. If you don’t know right from wrong, you can’t obey or disobey a moral command. Once you introduce the concept of obeying or disobeying a law established by a legitimate moral authority, the attendant knowledge of right and wrong becomes a necessary ingredient. Put yet another way, it is not possible do disobey a command that involves a moral prohibition without first knowing that it is a moral command.
It wasn’t a moral command until they understood morality. One could, for example, say If you don’t stop hitting your sister I’m going to kill you.
It was a moral command for two reasons:
First, the command was placed in the context of an objective standard of behavior.
Second, it was expressed not in terms of external punishment but rather as the natural consequences for violating that standard.
And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
It’s along the lines of “If you drink the poison you will die–not if you drink the poison I will kill you.” That is why it is placed in the passive voice.
keiths,
You’re welcome, Keith. I think you’ll find the show to be very interesting, and quite revealing of how the bible is a distorted and/or false record of history.
StephenB,
Anyone with common sense can see that the adam and eve story is a contradictory, ridiculous, horrible fairy tale.
StephenB:
That doesn’t make sense. If your tennis coach tells you to follow through on your backhand, she is establishing an objective standard of behavior, but that hardly makes her advice a “moral command”.
Which is another reason why it wasn’t a moral command. If your doctor says “you must stop smoking or you’ll ruin your health”, he is informing you of the “natural consequences” of your behavior, but not necessarily issuing a moral command.
Grammatical quibble: That’s not the passive voice. The passive voice would be “if you drink the poison you will be killed”.
Anyway, you’re neglecting some very important points:
1. They didn’t die, so God’s warning was false.
2. God did not warn them of the actual punishment they received.
3. And the main point of this entire discussion: they didn’t know it was evil to disobey God. He punished them for something they didn’t even know was wrong.
KeithS
Your example doesn’t make sense. My tennis coach didn’t create me–nor do I depend on her for my existence–nor is her advice a non-negotiable demand– nor is she the only tennis coach around–nor is her advice infallible–nor does she have any moral authority over me–nor will I die if I don’t obey her–nor nor do I owe her unqualified loyalty, nor does our relationship depend on my obedience, nor is she…..oh well, I think you get the drift.
That is exactly the point I was making. I was explaining to Petrushka that God’s warning “you will die,” which is in the passive voice, is not the same thing as saying “I will kill you,” Did you even consider the point of the exercise? When God says “you will die,” in the passive voice, he in implying that Adam’s death will come about as a result of his own behavior as opposed to God’s vengeful act, which could be expressed as “I will kill you.”
I am sure that Petrushka can take care of himself. Indeed, he is the only one who has made a substantive comment. Everyone else is saying, in effect, “the bible is silly because I say it is silly.”
KeithS
To repeat that claim is not to defend it.
Please attend to my refutations of your own errors (and Patrick’s) @ 10:03 pm.
To nitpick a little, I would call it a fable or a “just so” story, rather than a fairy tale.
StephenB,
The bible is not only silly but despicable.
Watch the Nova show that I mentioned above, and you’ll see some examples of how inaccurate the bible is, and how your imaginary, so-called ‘God’ yhwh was conjured up.
Praise yahoo! LOL
Neil Rickert,
Well, either way it’s crap. 🙂
I thought that the Nova program tilted toward the Bible being largely correct about the time of the kings. The idea that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were large (for the area and time) and rich was at the last treated as basically true, when the question seems really not to be settled yet, the dates being hard to pin down. I mean, I don’t know the answer on that issue (not a pressing issue for me, “surprisingly”), but I don’t think they really knew it either.
To be sure, there wasn’t much consideration that the Bible earlier than the kings had much truth in it–maybe some incidents here and there.
I’d also note that it was pretty much the Hebrew Bible being considered, not the New Testament. Which is fine (whose Bible is “the real one”?), I just thought that they might have told us what “Bible” they meant to consider in the beginning.
Glen Davidson
I found this on the web:
Source
I don’t know who tat tvam asi is, but this struck me as being closer to reality, namely that we don’t really know whether Finkelstein is correct or if his detractors are. The Bible Unearthed might be something to look at, if anyone’s interested in these matters.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
Hi Glen, I was thinking mostly of the stuff about the alleged exodus and the source of the name yhwh and what has been found in relation to all that. Regarding David, I got the impression that the ‘House of David’ may have existed but was nowhere near as prominent as the bible makes it out to be. The overall impression I got was that the biblical stories they bought up are distorted, embellished greatly, or downright false. Like you said though, there may be some truth in some incidents here and there. I’d like to watch the show again so that I can absorb more of the details but I’ll have to wait until it’s shown again because I have dialup internet access and it’s way too slow to download that show.
Besides the stuff in the bible that is obviously fiction I think it’s very likely that the stories about things that actually could have happened are not very accurate or are just made up. It’s hard enough to get an accurate account of history for things that happened or may have happened much more recently than the incidents or people that bible stories are about. As I’m sure you’re well aware, people have a tendency to distort history or just make things up. As time goes on and more archaeological digs are done maybe more will be figured out.
I’ll take a look at the link you provided.
StephenB,
Those reasons don’t work. Keep in mind what you’re trying to accomplish here. You’re trying to fill in the blank in this sentence:
1. “Because he created them” doesn’t work, because merely being created by somebody doesn’t oblige us morally to obey him. See my “pimply-faced teenager” example.
2. “Because we depend on him for our existence” doesn’t work either, for the same reason. Suppose someone kidnaps you and locks you in his basement. You depend on him for survival, but that doesn’t morally obligate you to obey him.
3. “Because his demands are non-negotiable” doesn’t work, because the fact that someone is pointing a gun at your head doesn’t mean that whatever they’re commanding you to do is moral.
4. “Because he’s infallible” doesn’t work, because a) the story clearly shows that he wasn’t infallible, and b) it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway, because he didn’t tell them that it was evil to disobey him.
5. “Because he had moral authority over them” doesn’t work, because they didn’t know it was wrong to disobey him.
6. “Because they would die if they didn’t obey him” doesn’t work, because a) they didn’t know that God was telling the truth (and he wasn’t, as it turns out), and b) the fact that something has undesirable consequences does not mean that it is evil. You can damage your car’s paint if you drive through a sandstorm, but that doesn’t mean that driving through sandstorms is immoral.
7. “Because they owed him unqualified loyalty” doesn’t work, because a) you’re simply assuming that they owed him loyalty without justifying it, and b) they didn’t know it was evil to be disloyal. Remember, they hadn’t eaten the fruit yet.
8. “Because their relationship with God depended on their obedience” doesn’t work, again because a) undesirable consequences do not make something evil, and b) for the umpteenth time, they didn’t know that it was evil to disobey God.
keiths:
StephenB:
Again, “you will die” is not in the passive voice. It’s in the active voice. These are grammatical terms, Stephen. Look them up.
Yes, but you’re forgetting that dying wasn’t the punishment. They didn’t die, after all! The punishment was being banished from the Garden, having to toil for their food, pain in childbirth, etc.
keiths:
StephenB:
I’ve been defending it throughout the thread. If you need a refresher, click here.
Glen’s link inspired me to look for a transcript of The Bible’s Buried Secrets and as I was looking I found that the show is in two parts of an hour each. Wednesday night’s broadcast was only an hour long so maybe the other part will be shown next week.
ETA: Then again maybe it was two hours long and I lost track of time. 🙂
Confusingly, the BBC also has a documentary entitled The Bible’s Buried Secrets. Like the Nova documentary, it is available for viewing online:
Episode 1: Did King David’s Empire Exist?
Episode 2: Did God Have a Wife?
Episode 3: The Real Garden of Eden
Several minutes ago I was typing a comment here and all of a sudden my computer went haywire. Maybe the lord god yahoo exists after all and is punishing me for being blasphemous. :p
keiths,
Hmm, that is confusing. I don’t remember anything being mentioned about ‘God’ having a wife in the show that I watched.
KeithS
You have based all your arguments on two serious errors:
[a] You contradict yourself. On the one hand, you claim that the human author of Genesis intended for his readers to believe that God punishes people who don’t know right from wrong. On the other hand, you also claim that all Jews and Christians disagree with the author of their very own bible insofar as they want God to look good in spite of what the author says.
[b] You studiously ignore the different meanings of “knowledge” in Scripture. Among other things, that word can mean cognitive knowledge, experiential knowledge, or sexual intercourse. In this case, the passage does not claim that Adam and Eve gained cognitive knowledge of right and wrong after the fall. It claims that Adam and Eve gained experiential knowledge of Good and Evil after the fall. You are conflating the former with the latter without knowing the difference.
If you address these two facts, you will discover that all of your arguments are reduced to the status of unsubstantiated claims.
(Quote in reply) (Reply)
Creodont2,
As long as you were blaspheming Yahoo the Father and not the Holy Spearmint, you’re okay:
StephenB,
What’s incomprehensible is that you’re presuming to speak for “all Christians and Jews”. Are you truly unaware that many believers do not think the Bible is infallible? For them, conflict between the Genesis story and their religious beliefs is not a problem.
Not at all. I don’t know where you came up with that.
He wanted to tell the story as he understood it, and in that story God punishes people for doing something they didn’t know was evil.
I haven’t claimed that the author does, or doesn’t, want to make God look bad. Where did you get that?
I think he’s telling the story as he understands it. Whether you think it makes God look bad depends on you, the reader. For example, someone who accepts divine command theory, like William Lane Craig, would have no problem with it. To a divine command theorist, whatever God does is good because he does it, and whether it comports with our moral sensibilities is irrelevant.
You’ve offered no evidence for that claim, and I see none in the text.
False. You can know that someone wants you to do something without knowing whether it is good or evil to comply.
No, to disobey a command you simply need to a) know that someone wants you to do something, and b) decide not to do it.
I remember that from what I saw/heard. Asherah was her name, and there was a photo of a little figure of her. It was a brief mention, though, and it was in a lot of info about polytheism vs. monotheism, and “idolatry.” I thought that they could have mentioned “henotheism,” worshiping one god while accepting that there may be others, since that probably was the transitional stage to monotheism. But perhaps they thought it would be more likely to confuse viewers, and the evidence we have is mainly of apparent polytheists before Babylonian captivity and apparent monotheists after.
It was a two-hour Nova, at least here.
Glen Davidson
StephenB,
keiths is addressing most of your points similarly to how I would, so I’ll refrain from piling on. I do look forward to your response to his comments on divine command theory in particular.
There is one portion of your argument that I’d like to discuss, however.
This is an interesting, and testable, hypothesis. In fact, all of your apologetics hinge on this. So, I must ask, do you have any evidence for this view? The oldest fragments of Genesis are in Hebrew (the Dead Sea Scrolls), I believe. The oldest complete copies are in Greek. Can you point to any peer-reviewed papers that suggest that the words used in English versions of the Bible were inaccurately translated such that they support your claims?
Stephen,
You’re obviously unhappy with the idea that God is unfair to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story, but why? The God described in Genesis is clearly not the God that you and your fellow Catholics worship today.
Try reading the story afresh, as if you had never encountered it before. You will learn the following about God:
1. He plants a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil smack in the middle of the Garden of Eden, despite the fact that he doesn’t want Adam and Eve to eat its fruit.
2. He puts a clever and untrustworthy snake in the Garden and gives him the abiilty to talk to Adam and Eve.
3. He lies to Adam about what will happen if Adam eats from the Tree.
4. He walks around in the Garden, making noise as he goes.
5. He looks for Adam, but can’t find him, and has to call out to him.
6. Only after Adam tells him why he’s hiding does God figure out that Adam ate from the Tree.
7. God punishes the serpent for speaking the truth to Eve.
8. God punishes Adam and Eve for something they didn’t know was wrong.
9. God says to himself, “Wow. Adam is like us now, knowing good from evil. We’d better banish him before he eats the fruit of the Tree of Life and lives forever.”
10. God stations cherubim with flaming swords to prevent anyone from approaching the Tree of Life.
Is this the description of an all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent God who is perfectly loving and just? The idea is laughable.
The God of this story
a) has no foresight,
b) isn’t very bright,
c) lies to people,
d) physically walks around in the Garden, making noise,
e) has trouble finding people who are hiding from him,
f) doesn’t know what has happened in his absence,
g) punishes the serpent for telling the truth,
h) punishes A&E for something they didn’t know was evil,
i) panics when he realizes that Adam “has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”,
j) is afraid that Adam will eat from the magic Tree of Life of become immortal even though God doesn’t want that,
k) banishes Adam from the Garden before he can eat from the Tree,
l) has limited powers and must assign cherubim to guard the Tree because God himself can’t do it — he can’t be in two places at once, after all.
The God of Genesis is not the God that you and your fellow Catholics worship.
I think either of two extremes are unjustified. The first extreme is that it is literally true. The second extreme is to look at it from a modern perspective.
To test whether it makes sense, we need to ask, who were it’s original audience, and how were they intended to interpret it.
My thought on this are that the original audience was probably in Babylon and wondering why they had been abandoned by god.
The story is a rather simple one of disobedience and consequences. “This is why we can’t have nice things.” It’s an explanation and a cautionary tale. If it doesn’t hold up to modern textual analysis, that’s because it was never intended to.
The Israelites in Babylon would understand the metaphor of being driven out of the garden. They just had been.
StephenB and many of his fellow believers are loathe to accept that the Bible is a fallible book, written by lots of different people, whose ideas about God evolved over time.
To try to fit it all into a single, coherent framework is a fool’s errand. You end up having to distort the plain meaning of the text, as StephenB and HeKS are doing with the Genesis account.
Omnipotent god, with a limitless toolset and capabilities always seems to pick the ‘as if imagined by a goatherd’ way of doing things…
Richardthughes:
Some of my other favorites come from the Flood story, wherein
1. God regrets having made humans, having failed completely to anticipate what was going to happen after he created them.
2. God indiscriminately wipes out all of them except for Noah’s family.
3. God wipes out all of the animals, except for the ones that Noah puts on the Ark, despite the fact that it is the humans, not the animals, who are evil.
4. After the slaughter, God changes his mind and decides that he can tolerate evil humans after all, and that they don’t need to be wiped out in the future:
5. God is afraid he’s going to forget his promise, so he places the rainbow in the sky. It’s apparently like tying a string around the Divine Finger:
The God of Genesis is a dim, volatile, unjust deity who regrets his actions, changes his mind, and has memory problems. Is this the God you worship, StephenB and HeKS?
I seem to recall a chat with Heddle along the lines of “pre-flood, did Water not refract light to make rainbows?” Theists I’d like your views!
I remember asking a fundagelical that question, probably at UD. His answer was that refraction was there all along, but it Just So Happened that no one was ever in the right place at the right time to see a rainbow until after the Flood.
I pointed out that God, supposedly omnipresent, would have seen every pre-Flood rainbow, rendering post-Flood rainbows useless as a mnemonic device. I forget what the fundagelical’s response was, or whether he just ran away like they so often do.
Moronic. NOT ALL christians/jews agree with the passages / agree with each other / or disagree with Keiths.
What is it about Catholicism that turns ordinary peoples’ brains to mush? I blame all those years of catechism. Some of the Jesuits etc can, later in their education, undo their childhood indoctrination but most lay people never do.
I was raised in a (not-Catholic) church from preschool through high school, went every week to Sunday school, attended the weeknight teen groups … and I never once, never ever, believed that there was an Adam, an Eve, a paradisiacal Garden, a Tree, a Snake.
I wasn’t dumb enough to think that was anything other than a fable, so I never had to make up excuses for why the supposed god of that story was so goddamned incompetent and mean. And in fact, every person whom I remember in the church thought Genesis was a fable. No one told me that any chapter of Genesis was true or doctrine or the “accepted wisdom”. No religious leader in our church would ever have endorsed the filthy idea of “original sin” or the filthy idea of Eve’s culpability in eating the (imaginary) Forbidden Fruit.
So you’re just plain wrong to claim that “all christians and jews” have a common interpretation of Genesis, and you’re wrong that the common interpretation is similar to your own. Sorry to insult your brainpower, but you’re a grownup and you should know better than to claim that.
Why are you dumb enough to think that story ever had any truth in it? Why are you dumb enough to think that all religious (christian/jewish) people agree with you?
Many (or most-all) christians (and muslims, etc.) and especially the zealous ones like IDiot-creationists, are described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malignant_narcissism
GlenDavidson,
I’m anxious to see the show again, especially if I missed some things, but I’ll have to wait until it is rebroadcast or until I get a friend with high speed internet access to download it for me.
Apparently it must have been two hours long and I lost track of time. I’m getting old. 🙂
There’s a new Adam and Eve thread at UD.
A request to any TSZ readers who aren’t currently banned there: Could you post a link in that thread back to this thread? I’d like to hear from more UDers.
Thanks.