What things causes stupidity,ignorance?

[Confused Ape]

To me, it seems that God set mankind up to fail in the garden, but that was the whole point. Prior to the fall, everything was perfect, they wanted not, and nothing they did was wrong. However, in this state, they would never experience failure, and never experience loss. One cannot recognize that one is free until one has seen that one's actions have consequences; you can't strive and experience the basic of choice, if you've no knowledge that you can fail, or that you can lose something. Adam and Eve would not truly touch their essential freedom, God's greatest gift to them, until they experienced failure and loss as a result of the choices they had made. The fall in the garden was God's plan to introduce them to their essential freedom, by letting them fail. In a sense, it was the existential version of pushing them out of the nest. So the fall wasn't intended as a punishment, the fall was God's way of teaching mankind of its essential freedom. The fall was God teaching man to fly.

The above adds another layer of possible meaning to the story. God could have planted the tree of knowledge of good and evil up in his own realm but he chose to put it in the Garden with Adam and Eve. After Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit God turns up again.

Genesis 3:8 And they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God amongst the trees of the garden.

9 And Jehovah God called unto the man, and said unto him, Where art thou?

10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

13 And Jehovah God said unto the woman, What is this thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

This strikes me as God giving them a chance to take responsibility for their actions but they behave like kids who try to put the blame on someone else even though everyone knows who did the dirty deed. It's all part of the learning process, however.

Now I don't believe in the fall, of course, so my interpretation was just an excuse to go outside and stretch my neurons. However, the potential for radically divergent interpretations suggests that there are many interpretations which go undiscussed; and that the traditional polemics that is often used by secularists in discussing the fall is to take on the classical theological interpretations of the fall lock-stock-and-barrel, and only a select variety of them. When you get locked into one particular way of viewing the story, with a view toward attacking or defending the beliefs surrounding the story, it limits your vision.

The symbols which turn up in myths and dreams etc. don't have one simple meaning which everyone agrees on. It seems that how people interpret them can be influenced by personal and cultural world views. The Serpent is a particularly complex symbol because it has many shades of meaning throughout different traditions. Genesis isn't the only mythical place where a serpent and a tree are found together eitherSerpent and Tree

In many myths the chthonic serpent (sometimes a pair) lives in or is coiled around a Tree of Life situated in a divine garden. In the Genesis story of the Torah and Biblical Old Testament, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is situated in the Garden of Eden together with the tree of life and the Serpent. In Greek mythology Ladon coiled around the tree in the garden of the Hesperides protecting the entheogenic golden apples.

Níðhöggr gnaws the roots of Yggdrasil in this illustration from a 17th century Icelandic manuscript. Similarly Níðhöggr (Nidhogg Nagar) the dragon of Norse mythology eats from the roots of the Yggdrasil, the World Tree.

Under yet another Tree (the Bodhi tree of Enlightenment), the Buddha sat in ecstatic meditation. When a storm arose, the mighty serpent king Mucalinda rose up from his place beneath the earth and enveloped the Buddha in seven coils for seven days, not to break his ecstatic state.

The Vision Serpent was also a symbol of rebirth in Mayan mythology, fueling some cross-Atlantic cultural contexts favored in pseudoarchaeology. The Vision Serpent goes back to earlier Maya conceptions, and lies at the center of the world as the Mayans conceived it. "It is in the center axis atop the World Tree. Essentially the World Tree and the Vision Serpent, representing the king, created the center axis which communicates between the spiritual and the earthly worlds or planes. It is through ritual that the king could bring the center axis into existence in the temples and create a doorway to the spiritual world, and with it power". (Schele and Friedel, 1990: 68)

The Sumerian deity, Ningizzida, is accompanied by two gryphons Mushussu; it is the oldest known image of two snakes coiling around an axial rod, dating from before 2000 BCE.

Sometimes the Tree of Life is represented (in a combination with similar concepts such as the World Tree and Axis mundi or "World Axis") by a staff such as those used by shamans. Examples of such staffs featuring coiled snakes in mythology are the caduceus of Hermes, the Rod of Asclepius, the staff of Moses, and the papyrus reeds and deity poles entwined by a single serpent Wadjet, dating to earlier than 3000 BCE. The oldest known representation of two snakes entwined around a rod is that of the Sumerian fertility god Ningizzida.

The roots of these mythological stories probably go back umpteen thousand years and variations developed as humans spread out across the planet. Different tribes and cultures then met up again so mythological stories ended up borrowing elements from each other.