I’m going to say something that I’m not sure has been mentioned here in this thread yet, and I don’t think many people are aware of it: the serpent in Eden is not an evil being that gave rise to all the evil in the world. It is a serpent—nothing more, nothing less. The text says it is cunning. It doesn’t say it is evil. Another thing: at no point does the text of Genesis say that Adam and Eve sinned. That is a later interpretation. I believe that the story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and Eden is an allegory, a myth, and that it is likely the author of the text intended it to be interpreted that way. But much later, this interpretation took hold—that we must believe a talking snake conversed with a couple and that this account is the origin of all evil. The story is a metaphor about consequences.
I agree. That is what I have been saying from earlier in the thread. Therefore it is daft trying to seek some serious rational arguments and conclusion from a metaphor.
As I said, it is up to each individual’s intuition and insight to decide what the message from the metaphor is.
Genesis does not say much about the nature of the Serpent. According to the Quran, though, the Serpent is Satan.
Correct.
Here, I am interested in the literal understanding of the story.
Lucifer is not a fallen rebel angel.
The passage in Isaiah 14 that contains the term “morning star” refers to a human king.
The serpent of Eden is one thing, the figure in Isaiah 14 is another, the one in Ezekiel 28 is a third (another human king), and Satan in the Book of Job is a fourth. In fact, at no point in the Book of Job is it stated that he is the author of all evil, but rather that he is one of God’s sons. He is a heavenly prosecutor. Later, Christian tradition mixed these different stories and began to treat them as if they were all the same thing. It was from this tradition that the reasoning “serpent = Lucifer = the figure in Ezekiel 28 = Satan in the Book of Job = the author of all evil” arose. But the Bible itself offers no basis for this.
God gave mankind a choice..did He not? We dont know from the text how many trees were there, but just from looking around our own world now, I believe, there were many. There was only one that He said eat not of.. We’re rebels,mankind, we’ve been so from the beginning.
The thing i struggle with is this..This powerful & wise being was let lose upon us. We really have no defense, we have no power as far as wisdom is concerned, our nature we’ve been told, since the Fall is corrupt. We can slow corruption. We cannot reverse it. We’re in this struggle it seems, we cannot win. It pisses me off in a way i cannot express because i look to myself & i say.." I want to do good" but in myself. I cannot find..
I am confused about your argument. Do you mean to talk about foreknowledge, predestination, God as efficient cause of all things? Imagine a hypothetical world where you were going to do something morally wrong of your own free will. If I had the foreknowledge of you committing this act, would I be the cause of you doing so?
I dont think Eve"overate " the apple. To insinuate is ridiculous.
You would be the cause absolutely not..why would that idea cross your mind?
How would I be the cause? You still acted of your own free will.
You would be the cause absolutely not..why would that idea cross your mind?
I said absolutely not, you wouldn’t be the cause. I feel like a blind boxer here..
It was not a free choice, since the Serpent fooled Eve. Eve would certainly not eat the fruit since God warned her that they would die after eating the fruit. That is when the Serpent intervention becomes important.
I am not saying that God is the efficient cause of everything. I am saying that God put them in the sinful situation, knowing that they would eventually fail given the circumstances, as it is discussed in the OP, hence He is responsible for the first sin.
I apologize for the long post. I wanted to post this as a separate thread, but I accidentally posted it as a reply.
I’ve previously written a post about responsibility for original sin, presented as a somewhat humorous but relatable everyday scene.
Now I want to discuss this topic quite seriously and in depth.
This topic of mine is a continuation of several previous topics on the Law of Personal Interest (LPI) in human existence. Therefore, those who are curious about the origins of this law can review these topics in the Social Philosophy and Ethics categories.
I—and, I think, many others—have long had a fundamental question regarding believers, particularly Christians, that refuses to go away. It is said that God loves people as His children. So why does He allow humanity to suffer incredibly for millennia from all earthly misfortunes, hardships, violence, wars, disasters, and so on?!
I have repeatedly raised this question with believers who have a deep knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. Their answer is always roughly the same: God deemed it necessary to let people learn through their own bitter experience that all misfortunes are the machinations of Satan, and that people must turn away from him and come to God precisely through suffering. Moreover, this seems to be the price we pay for original sin. My question is: why such a cruel lesson?! After all, millions and billions of people have been suffering for thousands of years—including believers and those who love their God, including innocent children, and including those who knew nothing or still know nothing about the one true God.
And I ask: for example, I am a father to my children. You are fathers and mothers to your children. You and I—we love them. Our children are often disobedient. But would we really punish them so cruelly for their misdeeds for the rest of their lives? Especially while they are still young children. If it were within my power, I would, once and for all, from birth, make them good and righteous people, and there would be no need to punish them with cruel punishments and trials. I am certain that the overwhelming majority of people on the planet would want this. But, unfortunately, this is not within their power.
But God is all-powerful, isn’t He?! He loves His children—human beings! Why didn’t He do this? Then there would be no need to reform them at such a high cost—millennia of suffering for millions of people. And all this so that those who repent and take the righteous path might enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But God knew from the beginning that there would be very few such people. After all, the Bible says that far from everyone will be saved, but only a minority of people.
“Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and many go through it; but the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and few find it” (Matthew 7:13).
In other words, God knew in advance that He would not be able to make the majority of people righteous. And again, the same question arises: “So why did He undertake this entire cruel process of re-educating humanity—whom God loves—through suffering? Why didn’t God simply make all people righteous from the beginning? He had—and still has—the power to do so?!”
Bible scholars always give me the same standard answer: that if He had, we would all have become robots without free will. I reply that I know many of you personally and consider you to be very righteous people. May God grant that all people on earth be like you—then there would be no need for any other paradise. But you aren’t robots! You are all different, yet you are all just, decent, loving, and honest. In a word—righteous. What would be so bad about God making all people like you?
Their answer is always the same—about robots, about how people must choose the righteous path for themselves, without coercion from God. For this, God gave them free will. I disagree with them on this point. After all, God is all-knowing. He must have known in advance that many people would use this freedom of choice not for the good—neither their own nor that of others. So why give them such freedom?! Do you, believers, feel unfree? Does your righteousness weigh you down, or does the impossibility of walking an unrighteous path burden you? After all, even the righteous path offers considerable freedom of choice. Where is the answer?
There is another possible answer: God created man not merely righteous, but perfect. This was Adam. God gave him and Eve everything a person needs; they lived in paradise and lacked nothing. But they disobeyed God’s command regarding the fruit of the tree of knowledge. For this, God punished them and expelled them from Paradise. They ceased to be perfect and became ordinary, sinful people. And their children were also born sinful. This is original sin, which weighs upon all of humanity—including every infant.
A few questions right away:
First—the one already asked above: Can you imagine parents who love their children punishing their foolish children so cruelly? (Where is the love for people?)
Second question. What normal, humane person would consider tasting the fruit of the tree of paradise such a terrible sin that all of future humanity should be punished for it? It would have been no problem at all for God to resolve this issue in any other way. After all, it almost seems like some kind of provocation. Because everyone knows—and God certainly could not have been unaware—that “the forbidden fruit is sweet ”
Third question: If Adam, who was perfect prior to eating that fruit, sinned, then just how perfect was he? After all, God created Adam. And it turns out that even a single, tiny sin was already inherent in him—the desire to taste that fruit in defiance of God’s prohibition. Is God responsible for this? And for this sin, which was passed on to all of humanity—even though humanity hadn’t even been born yet?
A question without a convincing answer.
And here I come to the heart of this chapter. The sin does not lie in the very act of tasting the forbidden fruit. The sin lies in the fact that Eve and Adam desired that their eyes be opened “and you will become like God, knowing good and evil.” This is the essence of sin: Adam and Eve wanted to bring their own capabilities closer to those of God—that is, they wanted to be able to do and possess far more than they had before. What is this, if not the pursuit of satisfying one’s own desires, one’s own self-serving interests, and one’s own personal gain? In other words, this desire to prioritize their own personal interests was already evident in Adam and Eve, even in defiance of the prohibition issued by God Himself—their Creator and Ruler. A God in whom they did not need to believe, unlike all those believers who, hundreds and thousands of years later, heard about Him and learned of Him from the millennia-old writings of mortal men. But a God who was right there with them, whose voice they heard in person and, it seems, even saw. After all, did He not supposedly even walk with Adam in the Garden of Eden?
And I began to suspect that the original sin of man and humanity lies not in the very act of tasting the fruit or breaking the prohibition—as most people familiar with this part of the Bible believe—but precisely in this desire to satisfy one’s own selfish interests, one’s own personal gain. And even Adam and Eve were created with this flaw.
Hence my bold conclusion:
Man’s original sin is his desire to prioritize his personal, self-serving interests and his personal gain over the interests of others; it is human selfishness, ingrained in human nature.
And it was instilled—by God. After all, Adam was born exactly as God willed him to be—and even in His own image and likeness.
And here, for the first time, the Law of Self-Interest manifested itself in relation to humankind. The forbidden fruit represents the first instance of this trait described in the Bible.
Perhaps this is where we should seek the answer to the eternal mystery. Why, as it is claimed, is even a newborn (or even an unborn) child already sinful? Could it be that the child is sinful because it is already known in advance that it will inevitably be born with the sin of prioritizing personal interest and self-interest, with an innate quality of selfishness?
As mentioned above, God created Adam and Eve. And, accordingly, the question arises once again: did He instill this quality, this sin, in them?
I have already stated repeatedly above that the law of personal gain is the source of practically all evil on earth. Why did God create humankind with this quality of selfishly prioritizing the individual over the collective, one’s own interests over the interests of one’s fellow human beings? Why did He send humankind into the world with this sin? Knowing that this sin—selfishness—is the source of evil.
(“And Jehovah said in His heart, ‘I will never again curse the earth because of man, for the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth…’ (Genesis 8:21))
I see two possible answers to this question directed at God:
• He was unable to make man absolutely perfect and sinless.
• He did not want to do so.
But the objection to the first option is that He is all-powerful and could have done it. The question arises: So, is He not all-powerful?
The objection to the second is that He is loving toward humanity, isn’t He? Then why did He act this way? The question arises: Is He not that compassionate?
This is where the ways of the Lord are unfathomable.
I fully understand—a thousand times over—what blasphemy and contempt for God I am committing, from the perspective of Scripture, and especially from that of the Church and every true believer, by reasoning in this way. For this, I ask their forgiveness. But here I have only one, feeble defense. After all, did not Jesus Christ command us to worship God in spirit and in truth? So that is what I am seeking—this truth.
The next stage in the search for truth is finding the answer to the question: “Was He unable, or was He unwilling?”
But that is another topic.
And the main idea of this article is:
• MANKIND’S ORIGINAL SIN IS ITS NATURAL, INNATE DESIRE TO PRIORITIZE THE SATISFACTION OF ITS OWN PERSONAL INTERESTS—this is human selfishness.
• This natural human quality serves as the primary source that fuels the all-encompassing, objective Law of Self-Interest: •
“MOST PEOPLE, IN MOST SITUATIONS, ARE MOTIVATED BY PERSONAL INTEREST AND PERSONAL GAIN”
Once again, I apologize to those who believe in the Holy Scriptures and in God
There are some many assumptions here and in this thread that I disagree with, I do not know where to begin:
The Bible consists of a number of books, stories, written by different authors, over a long span of time and reflects many different previous cultures myths and views. The Bible does not explicitly make God appear either all powerful (powerful yes, but not all powerful) or all knowing (wise and aware yes, but not all knowing). In fact God often appears to be clueless about what is going on and upset when he/she finds out. The main theme in the Old Testament seems to be law, judgement and punishment. The New Testament seems to have a different and more appealing theme but the notion of original sins seems OT in nature and I might add, unique to Christianity not found in Judaism or Islam.
I am not aware that “original sin” or the “innate sinfulness of man” is a biblical construct at all as opposed to an invention of medieval Christian theology. The garden of Eden (yes), Adam and Eve (yes), the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge (and in some interpretations the tree of life separately) yes but the notion of original sin (not so clear).
Almost the entire problem of “original sin” disappears if one drops the omnipotent, omniscient inventions of medieval Christian theology which do not appear to have a solid biblical or for that matter rational basis. God creates (fine). God brings order out of the primordial chaos, the void, the deep, the abyss (fine). God takes joy and pride in his creation. The notion of original sin (especially sending the unbaptized infant to purgatory or worse) or requiring the blood sacrifice on the cross for redemption or salvation of humanity, is a very primitive pagan conception eliciting notions of human sacrifice on the altar and more an invention of ambitious theologians than the biblical creation story found in Genesis.
A&E, with coaxing from the serpent, partook of the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God had told them not to do that. This meant a) banishment from Eden, b) mortality (God expressed concern about A&E eating from the tree of eternal life and becoming like God), c) agriculture, d) painful labor for A&E and their descendants. This is story of Eden, interpreted as the fall of man and original sin.
Easy, Dionysus was responsible for the first sin, it is why the Semites transfigured the Dionysian into “Woman” Aka Sin, the fall of man.
Nietzsche detailing the same values that account for noble Dionysian crimes of the tragic hero in Greek Myth were more or less turned upside-down by the Semites. From Birth of Tragedy 9.
And thus the first philosophical problem at once causes a painful, irreconcilable antagonism between man and God, and puts as it were a mass of rock at the gate of every culture. The best and highest that men can acquire they obtain by a crime, and must now in their turn take upon themselves its consequences, namely the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended celestials must visit the nobly aspiring race of man: a bitter reflection, which, by the dignity it confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the fall of man, in which curiosity, beguilement, seducibility, wantonness,—in short, a whole series of pre-eminently feminine passions,—were regarded as the origin of evil.