uselesssluethplease

Enigma

~This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief~

183 posts

Biblical Opinion That No One Asked For But I've Always Thought It Was Pretty Clear That The Adam And

Biblical opinion that no one asked for but I've always thought it was pretty clear that the Adam and Eve story is meant to be an allegory. If you release yourself from the chains of examining the Bible as an attempt at fact to be proved or disproved and simply read it like you would any other story, I think there's some pretty interesting themes to explore. Personally I believe the Adam and Eve story is an ancient myth meant to explain that God (/the Creator/the Universe/whatever you want to call it) wanted their creations to have free will. This answers many common complaints about the story:

Why would God put the tree there at all? It wasn't meant to be a real tree, it symbolizes the spark of humanity and the spiritual conscience that is only gained if a being has self awareness and free will. Without that knowledge, we would have been infants or animals all our lives, and the creator didn't want that.

Why would God allow the devil into the garden? Again, he didn't, because it's a metaphor. The snake (which is never textually mentioned as being the devil) symbolizes the dark side that is gained by consuming the fruit. In other words, the ability to do evil, which isn't something an infant or an animal has. It's the voice in our heads that guides us towards wrongdoing, but it's a necessary voice to allow for free will. It shows how humanity, given even the most ideal circumstances, would not be humanity if they didn't sometimes give in to this voice.

Why was it Eve that gave in first? This has been construed in a very misogynistic way in the past, but there's a lot of ways to interpret this action. I think one could argue that Eve being the one to bring free will to humanity symbolizes motherhood, as her proverbially giving birth to humanity's consciousness. It could also be meant to portray women as being more attuned to spiritual forces. I think it's interesting to note the similarities between Eve and the Greek Pandora, because they seem like two different versions of ostensibly the same story.

Why did God punish them and kick them out of the Garden of Eden if he let them eat the fruit on purpose? This symbolizes that a utopia like Eden is not achieveable, because we are flawed by free will and we will always wreck it. God took away our chance at utopia, and gave us our human nature instead.

Then why even give us free will? Why not let us enjoy a utopia? Shit man, I don't know. I'm just examining the themes of the story. I would guess that the people who first told those stories knew that humanity couldn't achieve utopian society and used stories to explain why it was impossible.

I have absolutely no idea where my personal beliefs on any of this rest, but I think we do the Bible a disservice when we refuse to engage with it as a historical text. It's a pretty remarkable book. Once you let go of trying to r/atheism your way through the stories and just enjoy them as stories, you will find so many interesting things to think about. Like any mythology or folklore, the old testament is a collection of stories that were passed around, some true, some false, some in between, but all shared over centuries because they gave their listeners some deeper meaning to the world around them.