Christian genesis

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

God was wrong to punish Adam for doing something that he (Adam) could not possibly have known was wrong.  He ate from the tree of Knowledge Of Good and Evil.  He would not have been able to tell right from wrong prior to the wrong act for which he was punished.

Not just a myth, but a particularly stupid and clumsy one.

Boru

But , from what I know , God gave him everything in the garden of Eden and forbid him to take the apple because he didn't need it. Adam taking the apple shows that imperfection( in a way ) was already there.God could have wanted to see if man can exist whitout the knowledge of good and evil.

Suppose I told you not to stand in the middle of a busy street so you don't get run over, but I phrased it as, 'Neef norp de glorp flagnel.'  You would have no idea what I meant.  You go and stand in the middle of the street, get run over, and as punishment for doing what I told you not to do but couldn't understand   I chop off both your legs.

This is precisely the case with the Eden myth - God punished Adam for a wrong act, but Adam couldn't conceive of the concept of wrongness until he committed the act for which he was exiled.

God didn't forbid Adam to take the apple because he didn't need it, he simply forbade him, with no explanation.

God (according to the manual) knows everything.  The notion that God wanted to 'see if man could exist without the knowledge of good and evil' is ludicrous on the face of it.  God knew Adam was going to disobey from the moment he was created.  This is akin to building a house, knowing all the while that you're going to deliberately burn it to the ground.

God myths (the one here is no exception) are nothing more than the attempts of primitive peoples to explain why everything sucks, no more or less to be believed than the folk tales of any other culture.

Boru

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If god is omniscient, then free will is an illusion. 

I don't see why ?

Because this:  Omniscient means 'knows everything'.  In the case of God's relationship to the universe, it means that God knows everything that is ever going to happen.  What is more, God has always had this knowledge.  The inevitable consequences is that there is nothing I can do that God hasn't foreseen, no choice I can make that God hasn't always known about.

Where then is free will?  If I'm trying to decide which shoe to put on first, or which hand to stir my coffee with, these 'decisions' are part and parcel of what God knows.  The only way I can have free will is to act in a way that God hasn't foreseen - in other words, to have the ability to do something that God didn't know was going to happen.  If I can do that, then God can't be omniscient.

Boru