God's injustice towards Adam and Eve

[Statler Waldorf]

How about after this fairy tale bullshit is beaten to death we go on to see if Hansel and Gretel were committing incest in the woods?

Perhaps on a forum dedicated to those who claim to not believe in the existence of Hansel and Gretel but for some reason those online communities are hard to find even though atheists love to claim that the belief in God is no different than the belief in fairy tales. Apparently even they know that the two are not analogous.

Well, we have examples of it happening, don't we? That said, I'll yield the point, I suppose someone could have a 'good enough' understanding of death if it was explained to them: it's bad, your body eventually disintegrates, and your loved ones will be sad.

I agree, I feel that I understood what it was when I was a child and had yet to have anyone I knew die.

It's relevant to whether they were competent to be held accountable. There's a good reason we don't execute a six-year-old who kills someone.

Are you trying to hold God to a manmade conception of justice? God owned Adam and Eve so any attempted analogies drawn from how humans treat other humans is going to fall short of being analogous because we do not own one another.

Hypothetically speaking, sure. It doesn't mean the person doing it understands the wrongness of what they're doing. The plain wording of the story has A&E not knowing right from wrong until after they ate the fruit. I appreciate that you have a different interpretation, but it seems to be based entirely on the premise that it can't possibly REALLY make God look unjust.

Well it’s impossible for God to be unjust because justice itself is rooted in His immutable character. Does the plain reading of the story indicate that Adam and Eve were not alive since they were not allowed to eat from the “Tree of Life”? If not, then why does the plain reading indicate that they did not know any good from evil until after they ate from the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”? I think you are reading too much into the names of the two trees.

Sigh, that's what I mean by their awareness of their nakedness, sorry I didn't express it in a way that made that clear enough for you. Anyway yes, they did not feel shame prior to eating the fruit. You can't feel shame unless you know you did something wrong.

It’s not like it was morally wrong for Adam and Eve to be naked prior to the fall and they just did not know it, it was actually not morally wrong. The fall had a drastic effect on all of creation.

Shame is consciousness that your behavior was wrong. It's in the defintion and everything.

Yes, but they may have felt shame because being naked became wrong after the fall. My Bible actually does not say they were ashamed, it simply says that their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked.

A minute ago you were arguing that she knew what dying was, now you're arguing she had to know right from wrong in order to not want to do something she'd been told would kill her? It doesn't take a moral sense to resist doing things that might kill you, just a sense of self-preservation.

The reason she initially gave him for not eating the fruit was that God had commanded them not to. Rather than challenging whether or not she should listen to God, the serpent challenges what God actually told her.

You could make a much better case for that had not God specified there would be dire consequences for disobedience. The threat of death nullifies any argument that she had to know it was morally wrong to disobey to resist the serpent's wiles for even a moment. Instead it emphasizes her child-like mentality that she will apparently believes whatever she was last told, no matter who or what it came from.

Wait, so if I tell my hypothetical children the horrible consequences of adultery I am somehow undermining the fact that it is morally wrong?

According to your version, they had perfect moral judgement up to the point where they ate the fruit, which is pretty odd since when they had perfect moreal clarity, they ate the fruit!

No, that’s not what I am saying at all. I am saying that they knew that they morally ought to obey God and He was in communion with them and turn giving them perfect revelation as to what was right and wrong. They were resting upon his perfect and ultimate moral authority. Once they ate the fruit they lost that, they were left with their own fallible and clouded judgments. That’s the entire concept of sin, it’s a separation between man and God.

Look, I get that this particular part of Genesis is poorly written, but you're taking a story where a single fruit can affect your sense of morality or make you immortal literally. I don't think the people who first wrote it down took it nearly as literally as you do.

Then why is it written in the style of a historical narrative? Why did Jesus believe it was accurate history? Paul? Peter? And John? It would be absurd of me to believe I am more spiritually enlightened than Christ himself. I do not believe it is poorly written at all, it’s a profoundly deep narrative that makes perfect sense when examined within the context of the Bible and redemptive history as a whole.