The garden of eden.

[Skipper]

Seeing as the only reason we as humans started living outside of the garden was due to "Adams original sin" was it's gods original plan that they would eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil or did he honestly not know that they would dis obey him and listen to the talking snake?

It just seems that as an all knowing being he would of known they would listen to the snake he put there and eat from the tree.

Obviously I don't believe in a Christian god or the story of Eden, however it just shows another example of god "tricking" people and he himself creating the sin and the reasons we are punished for it. Of course the religious here will say it's all a test and there cant be good without evil and it's all part of learning from our mistakes so we can except god blah blah blah. But I thought it might be worth pointing out yet another ridiculous part of their book.

Also, where is the garden now? Did it fall into dis repair? Did Cherubim just forget to prune the rose bushes? Was god lazy with his lovely garden and should he have got Alan Titchmarsh on the job?

[Darwinian]

In those Iron Age days when people asked questions like, "where did good and bad come from", instead of thinking about it rationally they came up with weird stories to account for things they couldn't understand. Hence, daft stories about magic gardens, the tree of knowledge and talking serpents.

The one thing that stories like this require is that you suspend all disbelief and simply accept. I would imagine that in most devout Christians minds the very idea of asking questions like this is to question God's plan itself and is therefore a sin and so they conveniently shut off that part of their brain and stick with what they have been trained to think and say. This is why using logic and reason to debate people like this never works!

[Minimalist]

An interesting take on the whole issue.


http://www.mega.nu/ampp/eden/roots.html

Landsberger called the pre-Sumerian language simply Proto-Euphratian. Other scholars suggest that its speakers were the Ubaidians. However it was, the existing names were incorporated into Sumerian and written down for the first time. And the mythology of the lush and lovely spot called Eden was codified by being written.

“The whole Garden of Eden story, however, when finally written, could be seen to represent the point of view of the hunter gatherers,” Zarins reasons. “It was the result of tension between the two groups, the collision of two ways of life. Adam and Eve were heirs to natural bounty. They had everything they needed. But they sinned and were expelled. How did they sin? By challenging God's very omnipotence. In so doing they represented the agriculturists, the upstarts who insisted on taking matters into their own hands, relying upon their knowledge and their own skills rather than on His bounty.

[Ashendant]

An interesting take on the whole issue.


http://www.mega.nu/ampp/eden/roots.html

Landsberger called the pre-Sumerian language simply Proto-Euphratian. Other scholars suggest that its speakers were the Ubaidians. However it was, the existing names were incorporated into Sumerian and written down for the first time. And the mythology of the lush and lovely spot called Eden was codified by being written.

“The whole Garden of Eden story, however, when finally written, could be seen to represent the point of view of the hunter gatherers,” Zarins reasons. “It was the result of tension between the two groups, the collision of two ways of life. Adam and Eve were heirs to natural bounty. They had everything they needed. But they sinned and were expelled. How did they sin? By challenging God's very omnipotence. In so doing they represented the agriculturists, the upstarts who insisted on taking matters into their own hands, relying upon their knowledge and their own skills rather than on His bounty.

Our sin was Farming BWUH

[Minimalist]

That is the moral of the Abel and Cain bullshit story, you know.

[Lethe]

What I got from the garden story:

“It was the result of tension between the two groups, the collision of two ways of life. Adam and Eve were heirs to natural bounty. They had everything they needed. But they sinned and were expelled. How did they sin? By challenging God's very omnipotence. In so doing they represented the agriculturists, the upstarts who insisted on taking matters into their own hands, relying upon their knowledge and their own skills rather than on His bounty."

You think God would be proud of his children becoming self-sufficient, isn't that the whole point of child-rearing? Though the anti-agriculturalist mentality makes sense in a way, humans can be incredibly stubborn when it comes to progression. It parallels in respect to the anti-science mentality actually.

[Anomalocaris]

You think God would be proud of his children becoming self-sufficient, isn't that the whole point of child-rearing? Though the anti-agriculturalist mentality makes sense in a way, humans can be incredibly stubborn when it comes to progression. It parallels in respect to the anti-science mentality actually.

God reflects the characteristics of people who created god so as to excert authority vicariously through the god they created. It's pathetic that people born in the 20th century are still so eager to abnebulate their minds with the shabby deceit of so reprehensible set of people as these and who have further been dead for so long.

[Loki_999]

The whole story has fail written all over it. Come on, God points to big tree and says don't eat. Serpent turns up and tells Eve she should just take a little snack. The only way it could have been more bloody obvious that this was a complete setup would have been if it was a chocolate tree!

God would have known exactly what was going to happen even without being omnipotent. It would have been obvious to even Paris Hilton what was going to happen next!

[DeistPaladin]

Also, where is the garden now? Did it fall into dis repair? Did Cherubim just forget to prune the rose bushes? Was god lazy with his lovely garden and should he have got Alan Titchmarsh on the job?

The story mentions specific rivers so it's not hard to figure the garden was supposed to be somewhere in the Mesopotamia. Those who say that Genesis is just allegory need to explain why they mentioned specific rivers and bloodlines that trace all the way to Jesus.

[thesummerqueen]

Gardens represent a form of ultimate control over nature - cultivated land with the same characteristics as the outside world, but tailored to suit human needs. Agriculture was still in its infancy when these kinds of myths would have started evolving - it was still a form of "magic".

If you take it metaphorically and say that some people were booted out of an area where cultivation was beginning to be common, then forced to fend for their own in an area that was harder to work/less conducive to cultivation... [shrugs]

Skipper - having my own garden, I expect that since God has proved fairly lazy about most other things, he probably just said "fuck it" to that one too - roses are a lot of bloody work, literally. It takes a certain level of insanity to spend your time getting snagged and scratched and torn by a bush that's going to give you only 1 month's worth of blooms in some cases. Plus, the sheer number of pests he thought to also create make it exhausting.

Interestingly enough, moving to agriculture was not the brightest move humanity made. You're tied to one area, you're taking in a less varied diet (even if you plant more than one staple crop, you're not getting the varied nutrients that a gatherer would find) and (speaking from experience having few tools, and little money, and only my own back) getting things to grow is HARD WORK. Way more hard than killing a mammoth once every two weeks or so. Constant fucking work. Like...the insanity of the roses times 12. Plus, you have to find a place to store the surplus, and someone could decide to overtake it so you have to organize to defend it...