defend the indefensible: the fall of man

the adam and eve story is the worst biblical myth. it is anathema. it is oppression. it is poison. anyone got anything to say for a god who manipulates his creation into failing on his own terms and then turns full slavedriver? a god so power-mad that he wastes a perfect state of affairs because he wasn't obeyed? who hypocritically put a forbidden tree of knowledge there in the first place? whose other face IS the tempting serpent? a god clearly and utterly based on whichever egomaniac despot happened to commission a scribe to write it up?

i love much of christian and hebrew myth and spirituality and even some of the rites* but this shit is the root of all evil frankly, the absolute abjection of humanity

*have been spotted in a unitarian church, believe in 'god' the divine agency of all

gnostic interpretation is the best one imho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA1aHrfxgEg

what is the gnostic interpretation?

a god ... who hypocritically put a forbidden tree of knowledge there in the first place? whose other face IS the tempting serpent?

idk seems p accurate to me

http://gnosis.org/genesis.html

wildly simplified version: God in the story is a false/evil God, Adam&Eve are punished because the serpent brings them true spiritual knowledge about the nature of the world (ie, there is a true God of love, harmony, etc. who is cut off from the material world, which the false God has assumed power over)

From Harlan Ellison's The Deathbird:

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
(Give 5 points per right answer)

1. Melville's Moby Dick begins, "Call me Ishmael." We say it is told in the first person. In what person is Genesis told? From whose viewpoint?

2. Who is the "good guy" in this story? Who is the "bad guy"? Can you make a strong case for reversal of the roles?

3. Traditionally, the apple is considered to be the fruit the serpent offered to Eve. But apples are not endemic to the Near East. Select one of the following, more logical substitutes, and discuss how myths come into being and are corrupted over long periods of time: olive, fig, date, pomegranate.

4. Why is the word LORD always in capitals and the name God always capitalized? Shouldn't the serpent's name be capitalized, as well? If no, why?

5. If God created everything (see Genesis, Chap. I), why did he create problems for himself by creating a serpent who would lead his creations astray? Why did God create a tree he did not want Adam and Eve to know about, and then go out of his way to warn them against it?

6. Compare and contrast Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling panel of the Expulsion from Paradise with Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

7. Was Adam being a gentleman when he placed blame on Eve? Who was Quisling? Discuss "narking" as a character flaw.

8. God grew angry when he found out he had been defied. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, didn't he know? Why couldn't he find Adam and Eve when they hid?

9. If God had not wanted Adam and Eve to taste the fruit of the forbidden tree, why didn't he warn the serpent? Could God have prevented the serpent from tempting Adam and Eve? If yes, why didn't he? If no, discuss the possibility the serpent was as powerful as God.

10. Using examples from two different media journals demonstrate the concept of "slanted news."

Discuss "narking" as a character flaw.

lol

william blake generally has the answer to everything tbh :)

might get hard into gnosticism, where to start tho

as a civilization origin myth i've always been, idk, tickled, by this: the idea that we gave up something irrecoverable for the power that comes from knowledge and technology. (anti-agriculture people to thread.) that the state of affairs in eden seems creepy and totalitarian to us now has always seemed like part of the point. we could never be happy there now because we ate the apple. if you wanna say well good, we should have eaten the apple, we had to eat the apple to become the curious questing dissatisfied freedom-loving things we are -- maybe! the story says that it was a mistake -- that it was a benign and loving totalitarianism we pointlessly emancipated ourselves from, that we were once cared for by the world around us and are now at war with it -- and now that we all believe in science and money and know that priests are usually assholes that's a hard idea to accept or even understand. as part of the general history of trying to figure ourselves out though i think it endures for a reason.

i'm ignorant in the extreme tho and the above is just how i feel about the story in a vacuum. things the story has made me think about.

Nag Hammadi is the source texts. Pagels (ref'd in that article) is a great guide to that material. PKD for lolz

xp

your interpretation falls down, dlh, when we consider the flaw at its heart: God told Adam and Eve that they would die if they ate the fruit - there was no innocence, the concept of deeper knowledge itself existed before the fall - it wasn't a choice between benign totalitarian wilderness and corrupted technological 'advancement', it was a preconditioned and rigged game. absolute innocence was always an impossibility. pretending it wasn't is part of what allows the powerful to trick the oppressed into thinking it's all their own fault. again, blake to thread.

I'm not sure I have a dualistic outlook (will need to think about it more, tbh) but I like this:

To rise to God, the Gnostic must break the dualism and reach the "knowledge" which mixes philosophy, metaphysics, curiosity, culture, knowledge, and secrets of history and universe

knowledge is literally the only thing i expend any effort to obtain that i wouldn't actually die without (i don't even think sex qualifies at this point) and i'm still wary of the gnostics and of anyone else who gets too excited about it.

w stuff like god's lie, or the correlation of forces between god and the serpent, or god's anger, or, yknow, theodicy and its failures: i think you are supposed to be troubled by that stuff. certainly god's behavior in the story has never been unrecognizable to me. you are of course right that it lends itself to being used for oppression (by people who don't let it trouble them) but i dunno that we should dismiss it as propaganda.

i wish J had a version tho.

gnosticism is such an obvious, corny indie snob religion. "the god the masses worship is so lamestream. listen to this *real* authentic god instead"

frankly i'd rather just assume that god is a full-stop asshole than pretend there is a better god behind the false one.

shitheads all the way down

a more perfect, imaginary past is the basis of all conservatism

gnosticism is such an obvious, corny indie snob religion.

lol. well they did have beards I suppose

That said even if god is an asshole, it is our duty to oppose him and his creation at every turn

http://armyofawesomepeople.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/satan-e1348776842386.jpg

I hated God before it was cool btw

when i saw this thread title btw i thought it was gonna be "defend the decision to eat the fruit" and was like lol what an easy thread

man i was deep deep deep into this shit for a little while (did a dante and milton seminar at the same time in lolcollege) but tbh the particulars are pretty hazy to me now

as a story about a loving god, yes, it's a little bit of a disappointment. but as an explanation for the human_condition i think it's pretty good.

"why is life so hard? why do we die? why is sex so fraught and childbirth often lethal? why must we struggle against an unyielding earth to merely eat?" "it's our fault lol"

because God is a dick

iirc milton's explanation/dramatization of all this hinges on the relationship among the trinity. there are conversations among the father, son and holy spirit about everything. man i cannot recall one word of that. shit.

actually ok

10. Using examples from two different media journals demonstrate the concept of "slanted news."

i do think the gnostic interpretation (partic the part that has eve as a spiritual quality awakening in adam and driving him to liberation) is as important as the trad one, even if i think its optimism and human-love is as incomplete as the usual pessimism and human-shame. that the story supports a dialectic like this (blake and the gnostics and harlan ellison aren't rewriting it; they're doing exegesis) is why it's literature and not a commandment. how should we relate to our knowledge? to our longing for more? to a universe with two faces that are actually one? which voice should we obey? when god says "now the man has become like one of us," how should we feel about that? should we wear loincloths? yknow. it's fertile ground.

xps yeah what goole said.

god is the og rockist, things used to be WAY better before kids came + ruined it all

iirc milton's explanation/dramatization of all this hinges on the relationship among the trinity. there are conversations among the father, son and holy spirit about everything. man i cannot recall one word of that. shit.

― goole, Friday, May 31, 2013 7:17 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that fuckin' hack dante. can't even write any memorable dialog. smdh.

i like that they hide because they hear god "moving about in the garden." like don corleone.

I can see how the "rise to God" quote I pulled might seem snobbish and objectionable, but to think it can also be accomplished - according to Zen belief - in a transcendent instant of harmony (or indeed disharmony) - or according to more classical Buddhist theory in the simple non-act of belonging without desire - these equate with the Gnostic path - all are concerned with approaching the Divine - I shall choose my own path - all are valid. Pantheism C/D etc

the optimism of the fall in milton (again, iirc!!) is that as humans fell, they fell out of perfect union with the father but they fell into discourse i.e. their god-given autonomy and intelligence, such as it is, has the potential for making new things, solving problems. god's first creation, the angels, also rebelled (1/3rd of them anyway) and for all their immortal power all they did was make hell.

satan and his angels can only pretend to imitate the power of god, but humans can actually do something new and unexpected with their liberty, even if it kills them.

milton was an anti-(or at least heterodox) trinitarian, wasn't he?

iirc from paradise lost, god made man basically as a do-over after 1/3 of his angels rebelled against him, but like the angels, man was made "sufficient to stand, but free to fall" - ie they were hard wired with the ability to transgress, and i guess god should have known what was gonna happen after what went down with the angels. but then again it was because of this fall that god was able to save us and we got jesus, this justified god's ways to man, etc. but i haven't thought about this in a while

xp to gooles first post

satan and his angels can only pretend to imitate the power of god, but humans can actually do something new and unexpected with their liberty, even if it kills them.

― goole, Friday, May 31, 2013 3:25 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah yes this is a big part of book 3 now it's coming back

yeah i don't remember enough to answer re: the trinity

but the son of god has a big role in it (long before showing up on earth as jesus)

agai

one of the interesting paradoxes of it is that in giving his last creation total freedom he has (unwittingly? i don't remember) placed limits on his own omniscience. he can guess pretty well, but he doesn't know what we're going to do. i forget how that worked with the angels.

i think in dante he describes the creation of the angels, their rebellion, defeat and exile as happening in the space of about 30 seconds, by human understanding! i.e. it was a spontaneous and inevitable fact of free will

again this is just from milton but iirc in god's eyes what separated (and excused, in a way) man compared to angel was that man transgressed after being beguiled from without (by satan), while satan and his crew were "self-deparaved"

i forget what milton's weird views were re: trinity but he does refer to the Son as "begotten" rather than coeternal

sexxy

ha yeah milton probably had god doing some pretty kinky shit

the thing about earth's ills being spawned through mother-son incest involving death or fear or something was pretty disconcerting

the 'fall of man' stuff is strictly a christian invention, right? harold bloom says somewhere in one of his books that the garden of eden was originally just meant as an origin story, not a 'this is why we are damned for all eternity' story.

i kinda love this story because it's so typical of how weird and alien the early bible stories are. from a modern perspective, the ethics make no sense at all -- adam and eve's punishment seems wildly out of proportion to their crime (god goes much easier on cain in the next chapter), god is basically caught in a lie but (being god) doesn't have to suffer for it, and god doesn't even TELL eve directly not to eat the fruit but she gets punished worst of all. if you change the names, it almost reads like a grimm-era fairy tale: a couple of innocents encounter a magical talking animal and are tricked into disobeying a powerful lord, and disaster ensues.

death and sin, even xp

the 'fall of man' stuff is strictly a christian invention, right

yeah it doesn't really figure into Judaism (see also "original sin" etc)

from a modern perspective, the ethics make no sense at all

I would put this down to the stories being amalgams of at least three different myths/sources

i can get with the cain story a lot more. god's a fucking cunt despot who wants BLOOD and KILLING and SACRIFICE not some weeds lol but even if you feel rejected bro don't take it out on the innocent dude who won Cunt God's favour, take it out on Cunt God

(referring specifically to the first couple chapters of Genesis there - which I just re-read the other day in the R. Crumb version lol)

xp

I would put this down to the stories being amalgams of at least three different myths/sources

yeah, a professor of mine once pointed out how the language switches from 'god' in the first chapter to 'the lord' in the second chapter, as if they're two different characters -- the idea being that originally they actually were intended to be depictions of two different deities.

Lol just as I started reading a Genesis commentary, this thread appears

J's Yahweh is p much characterized as inscrutable and almost addicted to cruel power games; Bloom points out that Yahweh's first words are basically "eat any fruit in the garden except for the tree of knowledge; eat that and you shall surely die" and his last words are to Moses, "you will be within sight of the Holy Land but you will not cross over into it" --see this? Its yours but mot yours-,and Brueggemann points out that as irrational as the Tree of Knowledge, even moreso is God rejecting the fruits of Cain for no real reason, sending him into a devastation spiral.

From what I've heard, the Adam and Eve story was likely written as a rebuke to Solomonic questing after knowledge and autonomy, but I've only read one commentary so

Brueggemann doesnt really buy into the 'fall of man' hype either fwiw xp to JD

even moreso is God rejecting the fruits of Cain for no real reason, sending him into a devastation spiral.

I actually brought this up to a rabbi once when I was young, and the rabbi said that if you read it closely it says something along the lines of "Abel brought the BEST of his flock" whereas Cain just brought "some fruits and shit". So it was the failure to give his best. I thought that was bullshit though, god just likes lamb better than vegetables. Who doesn't?

i thought there was political allegory in that, sth about more stationary agrarians vs semi-nomadic herders

as I just said it's naked bloodlust, the ancient custom of divinity through blood sacrifice. it's blood, death, supremacy, shit

god gives him superpowers for killing his brother. Perverse incentives man

that is one of the few advocations for forgiveness Yahweh proclaims in the OT, it is to be cherished

it's mostly all 'if you're my people, fucking do as I say or you'll die, if you're not my people, fuck with my people and you die horribly'

you can forgive a killer without giving him sweet retribution multiplier tattoos

I think as a parable about sovereignty (both theological and political) it's pretty profound. Our relationship to the state, community, even democracy is predicated on a circumscription of our own wills, self-determination, etc. The "fall" marks the condition of our belonging to those things. Maybe this is too much like a Freudian "civilization and its discontents" kind of thing but I dunno it works for me.

I think the actual scripture (or scriptures, aren't there two accounts in Genesis?) gets clouded by layers and layers of interpretation. Translation into Greek being one such layer, inclusion in something called The Bible being another.

Text is then unfairly blamed for various people's thought and actions, arising from their interpretations. Even from their interpretations of interpretations.

Would, quite seriously, like to read a thorough exegesis of the Hebrew text, by a Rabbi, but don't know where to look.

Maybe the JPS Torah Commentary Series...?

tbh for the last few years i've felt hat "don't fuck with my tree" was a reasonable shout

Stop yer kvetching, Job 39-41 has the answers.

Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?

Well, can you, punk?

Were I Eve, I would have eaten from the tree of life first. Moreover, YHWH's prohibition (Gen 2.17) only referred to the tree of knowledge.

Once immortality was achieved, then I'd suss out knowledge of good and evil and join the god club.

isn't it implicit that they were already supping the fuck out of the ToL

very interested by ryan's post upthread - think it warrants elaboration

whoa, this is an interesting thread! for the last few days I had presumed it was about some dumb indie band or something until i saw it was on ile.

otm re: ryan's post. maybe i should finally get around to reading 'civilization and its discontents' haha.

silmarillion pwns this shit