Despite 100% foresight, he put it there. Didn’t have to, but wanted to.
God is the creator and origin of sin, suffering, and damnation by choice and design. If there were anything real about it, he would clearly be the evil one and has the world fooled.
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I really enjoy some of these because of their cleverness. Then there’s some like these.
Not to mention torment them for millenia, maybe floods, maybe locust, I’m definitely going to smite a city or two, oh and raining frogs, hahaha ha, yea that’s a truly genius idea!
In OT lore, humans were kicked out due to pragmatic reasons. Humans, made in god’s image, had just acquired the ability of unlimited knowledge. If they also gained immortality then they would equal god.
Humans were kicked out before they became like gods. Powerful angel things were left to guard the way back.
Why didn’t god want humans to achieve the god status?
I like the explanation from Gnostic Christianity the best (though gnosticism is considered heretical by the vast majority of Christians). It seems to fill in a lot of plot holes, but I guess people that actually believe the stories as true don’t like to think about that.
The gist of it is that the God of the Old Testament is not the same a the God of the New Testament. The NT God is the true creator of the universe, and when He created the universe, He created lesser emanations of Himself. Each emanation had a divine spark within them that tied them back to God. One of these emanations, Sophia, tried her hand at creation by creating the OT God. However, this creation was a corrupt being as she was unable to instill a divine spark within it. So she hid him away from the rest of creation.
That God found Himself alone and created the world in His image and declared Himself as the one and only God. However, since he was a corrupted creation, the world He created was corrupted as well.
Sophia came clean about her mistake to the true God, so he sent her counterpart, Christ, to the Garden to try and spread the knowledge of the true reality to the humans. He created the Tree of Knowledge and took the form of a serpent to convince Eve to eat from that tree, which would give her knowledge of the corruption in the world. However, the OT God was jealous of the true God, so He cast them out and made them forget what they learned.
Later on Christ returned to Earth and sacrificed himself so that his divine spark could be set free into the world and fix the corruption that was inherent in its creation. His disciples were given the mission of spreading the knowledge of this to all of humanity.
Which book of LOTR is this from?
If everybody on the block can do it, it isn’t cool any more
Good sounds like a jealous person then. Doesn’t He know about the 7 sins?
Even more interesting, how close to being God can you get before it starts to matter? Say humans are 10% God. Ok cool we have consciousness, can harness physics, and live 100ish years.
Now we are 20% god or some shit. We get like super human abilities, live longer and can traverse space. Life looks different from our perspective but there is still conflict there is still suffering. All relative to our new disposition. If we are still mortal and we still suffer does elevating all of humanity really matter?
If using the fall story as a jumping off point for theorizing, my favorite take is recognizing the impossibility of a relativistic shared paradise.
Was it that eating from a tree of the knowledge of good and evil led to exile from paradise, or would developing the relative opinions of what was good and bad necessarily make one perceive current living conditions as paradise if you could imagine something better?
And this difficulty compounds when two different people might each see different things as good or bad - if they are in a shared space, can that shared space truly be a paradise to them both?
Even though it’s not the initial intent of the story, it’s a much more interesting version of it.
It was kind of the other way around - they were allowed to eat from the tree of life, and were only forbidden from eating from the tree of knowledge. It was only after eating from the tree of knowledge that access to the tree of life was lost because they were exiled from Eden.
It’s just that I guess technically in the lore the tree of knowledge was a one and done thing and the tree of life you needed to keep eating from to gain the benefits.
That must be the one and only inconsistency in the Bible…
There are some Niel Blomkamp skits about God (I can’t remember the show they were from but it’s on Netflix) and they are funny as shit.
“What is that human doing?”
“He’s praying to you, sire.”
“Why?”
“Well, he’s asking you to make it rain.”
“Is that all?” Makes it rain “Such simple creatures, amused by the simplest of things… Send a plague!”
“What? Why sir?”
“It would be funny!”
He became Santa to monitor human morality on the ground level.
From what I’ve been taught, the apple is merely a symbolism, and it was really about Adam and Eve having sex, and that’s why people are born with original sin and need to be baptized to get it lifted.
Not that it changes much, but it wasn’t just an apple.
Imagine giving them both the body parts and the urge for sex and then being pissed they fucked.
Plus they’re nekid, what do you expect?
Ooh, I’ve never heard that interpretation before. Honestly, given my wildly puritanical upbringing I’m kinda surprised I haven’t.
I was always taught “it’s not about the fruit, it’s about their disobedience”. I feel like that at least makes a little more sense, but it’s still not great.
I’ve heard a rabbi describe it as an allegory of the transition from childhood in the garden to adulthood when we are cast out and face all the hardships of adulthood. Something that happens to everyone, even the first everyones.
Except for the children of the rich. Those adult children we’ve somehow allowed to reign over us in the real world and torment us in modern actuality.
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:”
If this is an analogy for parenthood it would appear that daddy really hates when their children grow up and is willing to smite them for it. Not exactly father of year material.
You know if you just read the text it is pretty clear that the story is about some angry bronze age god full of his very human pettiness.
Everyones interpretation is different.
For example, the fruit of knowledge in the real world would be psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics. There is a large number of mushroom based iconography on very old images of Jesus.
Considering the psychedelic nature of spirituality in Latin America, including use of the San Pedro cactus to perform Chrstian rites, it makes a lot of sense that “god” would be mad at A&E for eating shrooms
Bro he better not be mad at arts and entertainment TV. That shit was legit
John Allegro right? I would be more inclined to buy into his theory if
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Someone could show a path from the Dead Sea Scrolls all the way to the late Middle Ages that escaped all documentation (besides the two initial finds) except stained glass and icons. Not a single person bothered writing it down for over 800 years. That is an impressive conspiracy.
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The link between the Qumron community and the John the Baptist community isn’t as well established as I think he made it out. Yes there are overlaps but they were part of the same general culture. There isn’t a smoking gun, someone clearly was part of both and carried works across.
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The mushroom imagery is interesting but there are plenty of non-mushroom imagery as well. Including wands and rabbits and fish and eggs. Allegro is pointing to the one that gets the result but can’t account for the others.
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I just don’t see why you need a drug trip to come up with the Gospels. Every single part of it was either borrowed from Paul or from Jewish and Greek works that existed at the time. Plagiarism doesn’t need a chemical aid. As for the things that Paul said one dream could have produced it.
But hey Allegro might be right. All we would need to find is one document from the Vatican that mentions mushrooms in that context or another scroll in a cave or the equivalent of the 1st century BCE Grateful Dead poster ha.
Funny you mention the Vatican… whats in the vaults is probably worth hiding for their coffers to remain full, and people like us will never see any of it
If there was proof, my guess is things like global conquest, crusades, burning of the library of Alexandria, etc could account for the lack of its publicity.
In the end, its a fun theory that may or may not be true. But pretty much all of Genesis is provable false, so it doesnt matter anyways.
Really it doesn’t explain anything that isn’t already explained, it doesn’t simplify the data that we have, and it doesn’t point a direction to search for new evidence. Also you know lots of people around the same time were advancing drugs -> enlightenment ideas and all we got out of it is some bad sci-fi.
The evidence presented 60 years ago is the same evidence they have today. All the work done on understanding history and the human brain hasn’t added to those theories. Not a great sign. Successful theories get more supporting evidence over time not the same level of “wouldn’t it be cool?”.
All we got out of it was 50 years of prohibition because of how afraid the govt was of free thinking individuals
I never said I was against it’s use. I am clear that this sequence of historical events are explained adequately without saying it is part of it. Just because X happened does not mean Y was a factor, and it doesn’t mean I am against Y.
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Don’t read apologetics, read what the text says. That tells you what the people believed at the time
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Never thought I would defend the Bible. BUT you have obviously never had your lunch stolen. Some one stole a Bologna sandwich from me. That was 2006! Never forget!
