(April 4, 2014 at 7:28 pm)professor Wrote: Their [Adam and Eve's] choice brought specific results (I do not recall it being stated as a punishment).
Bible Gateway, NIV
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?sea...ersion=NIV
Quote:13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring[a] and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman he said,
“[b]I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
[my bolding and italicizing]
In the case of the serpent and the woman, God is the one doling out the "consequences" - and what are imposed consequences called but punishments? The only one who could even make the argument that God wasn't punishing him was Adam, but only because there is no first person "I will" from God when describing what will happen to Adam because of his actions. Inferring from what God tells the serpent and Eve, though, it's reasonable to read Adam's "consequences" as being doled out as a punishment by God, too.
Who or what could have determined the consequences of eating the fruit of the tree but God since God supposedly created everything and therefore would have also had to create all the consequences for doing anything, including the fact that certain plants will poison you if you eat them or touch them, that you will suffer as a result of diseases and what will happen to you if you eat a piece of fruit God told you not to.
You could also read these passages as all coming as punishments from God because it takes a person to strike a curse upon another person and God curses the serpent, and curses Adam.
Or do you think curses just materialize out of no where? In that case, who or what causes a curse but God, since God is supposedly the creator of all things and would therefore be the one ultimately responsible for creating the parameters for how and when someone will be cursed?
Teenaged X-Files obsession + Bermuda Triangle episode + Self-led school research project = Atheist.
