You make one mistake ….

Warning! This is covering religion so if you want to skip this one I’ll see you tomorrow.

So, I’ve been going through the Bible, following along with this YouTube channel – HeartDive with Kanoe Gibson and Holly Rigos. It goes through the Bible in one year. I started with the original set of videos from three years ago. I have to admit, it brings up more questions than answers for me. I’m a little behind and currently going through the book of Judges. They just covered the story of Sampson.

But let’s go back to the beginning. God created everything, including mankind. He set up Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are tooling around the garden, naked, having no problem with it. God has no problem with it. God tells them they can eat of any tree other than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And they’re cool with that.

Then the serpent comes along, tempts Eve to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, then she gets Adam to eat it too. All of a sudden, they are ashamed they are naked, and hide from God. God comes along, says why are you hiding and they tell Him they are ashamed. Then God gets mad, declares them both Sinners, along with all of their offspring for all time, and boots them out of the Garden, never to return. So, why is it that nudity has all of a sudden become something shameful, when before no one even batted an eye over it?

Now, God didn’t boot them out of the Garden for public nudity. He booted them out of the Garden because they disobeyed Him. As far as I can tell from everything in the Old Testament, it doesn’t really seem to matter what else you do wrong, as long as you follow God with blind obedience. Well, actually the Old Testament has a whole bunch of things to say about doing things wrong, but it all seems to come down to not obeying God.

So, Adam and Eve committed the first great sin of Disobedience. But they were not equipped to make ay real decision about obeying God. They literally had no knowledge of Good and Evil. They had no concept of consequences. They couldn’t reason and say ‘God told us not to eat from the tree. If I do so, He’ll be mad and punish me.’ They have no reason to dispute the snake’s claims that nothing will happen if they eat. They have no basis for comparison.

God could have avoided the whole problem by not putting the Tree in the Garden. Or keeping the snake out. Or any number of other things. Instead, God condemns not only Adam and Eve, but everyone else, for all time. He’s supposed to be kind and loving and merciful. He couldn’t sit down and say “OK, you messed up. I forgive you. Now that you’ve got this Knowledge, you can’t get rid of it. It’s going to be a burden. Here’s how to handle it”?

And, yes, Jesus came to redeem us all later, but that’s a topic for another time.

God could have made us automatons that always do the exact correct thing. He didn’t. He made us, set up a test, which we apparently failed, and then got mad at us and punished us for getting it wrong. If everyone got independent thought through eating the fruit, He has to expect we are going to do some wacky things, and not always according to what He wants done. It seems to me He should have fallen more on the “Fatherly Advice” end of things instead of the “Instant and Eternal Condemnation” end of things.

And all this makes sense to people?

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