adam and eve? sounds like BS...

According to my nun, Adam and eve were as close to all knowing as man would ever get (i would not know because ive never opened a bible in my life, i think it's crap, so ill take her word for it.) Now, can anyone tell me, why in the world all knowing people would listen to a TALKING SNAKE!? think logic here. your all knowing. you know snakes shouldnt be talking, yet you listen to one and defy GOD because a SNAKE told you too? i dont think so. sounds like a flaw to me.

 

Fist off, it's a myth--right? A story meant to convey a truth about the human situation. We don't usually dismiss Aesop because animals don't talk. What does the myth mean? Like most good myths, it's open to different interpretations. There's some resemblance to the Greek Pandora myth, but with emphasis on a desire for forbidden knowledge that would make humans equal to God. It's not the quest for knowledge per se that's the problem, but the intellectual arrogance that we can know it all and be like gods. There's also a Buddhist-like emphasis on desire as the root of evil. Here you have people who are living in Paradise and it's not good enough. These are basic human traits today, and in that sense can be considered "original sin". Yes, there's also the problem of trusting talking snakes, but Adam and Eve didn't have parents who could tell them not to talk to strangers.

 

so, you think the bible is crap and you have never opened it..interesting

 

I agree.
I put in my work and read the stupid thing before I ever called it crap. =)

 

hahahaha :cheers2: heres to a great comment!

 

Cheers.

Ain't it terrible how many Christians and anti-Christians have such little knowledge of their beliefs?

 

what are you fucking talking about

 

well, if you'd read the book you'd know that mankind didn't eat the fruit of knowledge until after the talking snake convinced them. Once they ate the fruit they became aware of the differences between good and evil, and god got pissed. Of course it's all just a creation metaphor, trying to explain how man is different from animals in that we have a moral sense, and are obliged to act accordingly instead of impulsively. I think this is crap, because my dog definitely has a moral sense (he knows when he does something wrong). I digress, it's all just a creation myth, trying to explain why people have language, syntax, a sense of good and evil, and clothes, as well as why snakes don't have legs (god chops them off as punishment). Just about every modern christian sect, including the Catholics, regard genesis as a metaphor, not to be taken literally.

 

Think Freud : the serpent beguiles Eve.
What does the serpent have in common with a naked girl in a garden?

There is also a moral lesson here, guys, just because your girlfreind suggested you do a silly thing, is no excuse to do it.

Next time she tries to talk you into something dumb, think!
Do you really want to be a struggling farmer for the rest of eternity?

The fall of man from grace is the metaphor this is all about. Its always to score with the girls that guys do dumb stuff like join the army, or stick needles in their arms, or become race car drivers, or eat trippy fruit, etc etc.

 

I guess if all animals talked in those days (ask your nun about the Tower of Babel for me, I want to know whether pre-Babel omni-lingualism applied to animals too, because seriously, how cool would that be?), it wouldn't be such a weird thing for a snake to be talking.

But yeah, it's a story, and since the moral of the story is "Women suck and are evil", it's hardly surprising that the Eve character is a bit of a twonk.

 

Yeah, but if we weren't doing that, we'd never do anything. All of civilisation has been attempt by men to impress the opposite sex. And sometimes the same sex. If women didn't drive men nuts, they wouldn't need to impress them, and we'd all be sitting around in our own filth most of the time.

 

I've heard this and don't really agree with it. It's basically stating that our entire lives are driven by sex, and that is really just not the case.

 

Directly, no. Indirectly, there's some argument for it. It's a bit involved, and builds upon theories that have become rather unfashionable (i.e. Freud) of late, but I'd be up for discussing it, though possibly not here. The idea that most of our own consciousness stems from the awful manner in which we are born and raised seems to me far more persuasive than that we have a soul because of something really nice going on.

 

hmm..

If you feel like investing the energy to explain it, then I'm down. Always good to learn. Start a new thread or PM me.

 

It is BS and it's not, they ate a psychedelic substance (what they cover up and call an apple), which explains it completely. But, it IS BS because this is just another way for religion to cover up the true spirituality behind itself...

Go eat some mushrooms and you will soon learn the bible is complete BS, they just created characters and text to hide where the true answers are and to keep future people doing the right thing without the use of psychedelic substances.

Good luck finding God.

 

I hope you don't sincerely believe that, snoc.

 

That the bible is a false way of portraying human beliefs and prevents one from ever fully understanding life itself, by just giving it hope/belief and not truth?

Maybe I'm wrong but I've read the bible and even went to Catholic school, and I've had my own ventures with my own consciousness and in my beliefs, we can all be 'Jesus', we all have the good side we choose not to follow because of society's means.

Enlighten me, though...

 

I'll give it a go here, I'd just be wary of getting into a "literalism vs. non-literalism" debate, because this basically requires one NOT to take the Bible either literally or as anything other than a book.

Stories like Adam and Eve are as near to textbook Freud as you can really get. The snake has an obvious resonance as a symbol of malevolent phallic authority. God, in chastising Adam and Eve (his children) becomes the benign phallic authority. The apple is a very traditional symbol of fertility, possibly because of the black seed very clearly framed and identifiable in the whiteness of its flesh.

In many ways, one could Eve as symbolic of the mother, and Adam as more symbolic of the son. After all, we, the reader, are not meant to think of Adam as our father, but as us.

I won't get too into Freud because I believe he wasn't exactly of sound mind, but some of Kristeva and Lacan's ideas resonate strongly with Genesis. The notion of The Word made flesh is very Lacanian, and speaks to our own construction, that of our identity, through language and communication. It's often observed that we struggle to conceive of concepts that we cannot describe verbally, and of course you also have the notion of God as inaccessible and somehow "beyond" embodied in the impronouncability of his true name.

Still, Kristeva has a lot to say, about how our disgust stems from a fear of permeability and that that in turn stems from some memory of our pre-identity existence. She conceives this as womb-like, oceanic, pre-lingual. I find this interesting, it seems to be born out in the way as a male-dominated culture see the invention of words as whimsical, childish, and thus feminine, while adept, skillful use of words is seen as adult, masterful, perhaps not manly but certainly masculine. It might also explain why so many women are good writers.

I don't know, there's more, and I didn't read as much as I should've, and I'm tired and everything. But a hell of a lot of human experience, human consciousness and human culture can be traced back to either sex, death or both. It's much more persuasive than I'm making it sound, especially when you consider the works of Levi-Strauss, who has a great deal of insight and well-researched interest in how human cultures which develop in isolation from one another have remarkably similar myths (the flood myth is far better explained as a symbol than as a single actual flood, I don't care what anyone says!). It's profoundly UNspiritual, being as it is necessarily bodily. But to a grumpy atheist it's as convincing and as refreshing as anything else I've heard.

 

I'm guessing that he was referring to the stuff about mushrooms. I've seen a fair few variations on the Garden of Eden myth, and none of them mentioned a mushroom. Many other myths have remarkably similar elements, but again, no obvious mushrooms.

 

That's an interesting perspective, because a lot of religious people consider similar myths that are developed in isolated cultures to be evidence that said myths did in fact happen.