Warning! This is another religious post. If you wish to skip this one I’ll see you tomorrow.
Righty-o. Let’s establish a few parameters for this.
God is perfect and doesn’t make mistakes. He is omniscient and omnipotent. There isn’t anything He doesn’t know or can’t do. He created the Universe, the Earth, the Garden of Eden and put Adam and Eve there. It was a paradise, and all was right with the world. I believe all these statements will be accepted as true by Christian believers.
Now, given the above, God decides to put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the middle of the Garden. He then tells Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit from that tree. No explanation as to why, just a command to not do it.
As I understand it, Adam and Eve have no knowledge of Good and Evil at this point. They don’t have any idea of consequences. They are ill-equipped to handle the serpent coming to them and telling them God is wrong and they can eat from the Tree. Given rhis conflicting information they have no way to evaluate whether this would be a bad choice to make or not.
OK, so they eat from the Tree, then God comes down, instead of doing a Ward Cleaver and explaining why they did wrong and telling them to not do it again, He goes for the instant and eternal condemnation, not just for Adam and Eve but for all their descendants (meaning us).
Then after an indeterminate amount of time, God sends Jesus, his only begotten son, to redeem us. And this makes sense to people?
If you already have everything running fine, just the way you want it, why do any of the above? Why first condemn everyone, then try to redeem them? Don’t put the Tree in the middle of the Garden, and the whole situation becomes moot.
We had lunch with the Pastor of our church today. His explanation, which I’m not quite sure I understand, was that Satan was cast out of Heaven for wanting to be God’s equal and get worshipped. Satan ended up on Earth, in the Garden, as the snake. God did what he did to test Adam and Eve. OK. But again, if you have everything set up and running the way you want, why do you need to test it? God, being perfect, omniscient and omnipotent shouldn’t have made any mistakes setting it all up, thus have no need to test things out.
If Adam and Eve made a mistake and failed the test, then God didn’t make a perfect creation when it came to humans, did He? The only way for that to happen by a perfect Being is for Them to deliberately make that mistake. If Adam and Eve weren’t perfect, why the instant and eternal condemnation for disobedience? Why didn’t God make them “perfect” to begin with?
Apparently all this makes sense to millions of Christians around the world. I fail to understand it.
If you can shed any light on this, my Hordeling, leave a comment and let me know.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum
I love it when people are willing to discuss things like this without having some sort of Biblical nervous break down.
I agree with what you’ve said. It makes no sense and isn’t a ‘just’ test since Adam and Eve didn’t know what good or evil was or, what it means to die.
There are a dozen places in the Bible that make me want to set the book on fire. Three or four beginnings. God created man, then later “Let US create man in OUR image.” Or the commandment to have no other gods before him which indicates there are other gods and he wants to be top dog. Or how about the mention of fawns and Hermes and Zeus? Dozens of places contradict themselves or make now sense.
Just like it made no sense that God, supposedly, kicked Satan out of Heaven then later on down the road is hanging out with him making wagers with Satan on what it’ll take to break Job’s faith and god allows Satan to test Job. What? Why? Were they bored that day? Why were God and Satan hanging out to begin with? And why is ‘Satan’ sometimes referred to as ‘the accuser’, does he still have rights as an angel? Serious F’d up book.
My oldest brother went to Seminary. He’d read every religious book out there. My brother walked away from religion. But the question he asked me that give me a permanent Christian twitch was: “Can God create an object so big he can’t move it? If he can’t create it, he’s not omnipotent. If he doesn’t know how, then he’s not omniscient.
And now this Ethiopian Bible….never mind the hype part of the program…but the books that are mentioned WERE in the Bible at one time, why were they removed? And why is it that most of them have to do with women’s rights and the 13 years Jesus was missing?
Sorry, wandered off a bit but, it was good.