The discussion of the last post turned pretty quickly to the Genesis story, and it’s been making me think about that for a while. I went back and read the opening of Genesis to make sure I wasn’t mixing up what it actually says with what people tend to think it says.
First thing I noticed was that the antecedents get kind of screwy. Sometimes you don’t know who’s talking to who. For instance, when speaking to the serpent, god says: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Whose heel? Adam’s? Eve’s? Their kids? It’s actually interesting to google that phrase and see how various christians explain what this means:
- It is a prediction of Jesus defeating Satan.
- It is a metaphor for sin tormenting your head and crippling you.
- People stomp on snakes.
- Eve and the snake had sexual relations.
- Good stomps on evil. (My favorite part of the website where I found this: “Hitting a snake on the head is a death blow – seeing its brain is in its head.” Nice to have that spelled out. It also claims a snakebite on the heel is a temporary inconvenience and not fatal.)
Personally, what torments my head is the job of reading some of these explanations. They’re mostly just strings of non sequiturs, expressed with great fervor.
But I digress. Maybe the serpent was intended to be Satan (and most of the christian apologists I found in researching this piece, laity and clergy alike, are pretty sure of it). But the disturbing thing is not what this story says about the serpent; it’s the tree of knowledge thing.
To recap the story: God makes man, and tells him not to eat from the tree or he will die. Then he makes woman, who somehow also gets this keep-off-the-tree message – maybe from god, maybe from Adam, maybe some other way, the book doesn’t say; but she knows it. Then the serpent shows up and says, no, you won’t die, it’ll give you knowledge of good and evil. So they chow down, they get the knowledge, and they immediately cover up.
The first thing you should notice here is that god lied to Adam, and the serpent told the truth. They got knowledge, and didn’t die. So, if the serpent is Satan, then in his very first appearance in the bible he is not “the deceiver” – god is.
The second thing you might note is that once they get knowledge of good and evil, what is the first thing they do? They become ashamed of being naked. Apparently being naked is evil. But if that is so, then why did god make them that way and set things up so that they’d run around sinfully naked forever unless they ate from the tree? Does god get jollies out of this? “Ho ho ho, look at those happy naked idiots! They don’t even know how sinful they’re being!” It’s like watching a dog run into a glass door. There are people who get amusement out of that. I wouldn’t care to associate with them. It’s pretty sad to think that’s the kind of god christians want to have running things. But I digress.
The third and most disturbing thing is the sinfulness of the tree of knowledge itself. There is no getting around this: the bible starts off by unequivocally stating that knowledge is bad. It’s dangerous and sinful and god doesn’t want you to have it. Trust me, says god, you’ll be happier without it. And to drive home the point, when they get some anyway, he punishes everyone from then on.
What an incredibly stupid, damaging premise to hang a religion on. Stay stupid, or risk the wrath of the creator of the universe. What a choice. Makes the lady and the tiger seem like Let’s Make A Deal by comparison. This sets the tone for the repressive, vicious anti-intellectualism christianity is infamous for. Don’t question, don’t think, don’t reason, or we’ll kill you. And we’ll be doing god’s work.
But even if we’re not talking about things like the Inquisition, the effects are still widely felt. For example, it makes possible the kind of brain-hurting crap I endured while googling for the various explanations of the bruise-your-head verse. If you believe knowledge and reason are an impediment to holiness, as the Genesis story makes it seem, then you are free to spew illogical nonsense and call it enlightenment. And the more grip that belief has on you, the less likely you are to be sensible and rational about other things, like politics or money or how to treat your wife and children. Or science. How much of the organized resistance to teaching schoolchildren actual science comes down to the belief that education leads you away from christ? Offhand, I’d say 100%; all of it leads back to that in one way or another. When I say “education,” by the way, I mean actual education, the kind that gets people to reason and think freely, and not “religious education,” which is an oxymoronic doublespeak euphemism for “indoctrination.” Or perhaps “brainwashing” might be a better word.
But again, I digress. The tree of knowledge story in Genesis lays the foundation for a tragic dualism: not mind against body, but rather knowledge against virtue, and we’re still dealing with that silly notion to this day. Show me the American who hasn’t met someone who thinks “ignorance is bliss” is intended as sincere advice, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t get out much. It’s astonishing that here in the 21st century we still tolerate it. Or, conversely, since we do tolerate it, it’s astonishing that the 21st century is any different from the 8th.
[...] Apparently being naked is evil. But if that is so, then why did god make them that way and set thi… [...]
Not to run us off topic in the face of your well-written essay, but I am reminded of the rejoinder, “If god had meant for us to be naked, he would have made us that way.” In this modest bit of humor is captured much of the insanity of the story you have written about. Why is the joke so obviously absurd while Genesis is not?
So many odd details in such a short passage!
The standard answer to the problem you raise: that the serpent tells the truth and god lies, is that before they ate of the fruit they were immortal and that their (eventual) deaths are a direct consequence of that act of disobedience. But this answer only shifts the problem elsewhere. For there is also a tree of eternal life in the garden. Why was such a tree in the garden if eternal life was the natural state of affairs before the first sin? Well, the stock answer goes, being omniscient, god knew they were going to eat the fruit. Fine, then how is it that he didn’t already know that they had eaten the fruit and didn’t know where they were? A very odd, selective omniscience, don’t you think? And what kind of creepy god sets his creations up to fail? Or is ‘bungling’ a better epithet?
Each of the standard answers merely moves the problem or creates others. If Adam and Eve were immortal, well then what was sex for? Why did they have reproductive organs? It can’t that they needed to reproduce. Good heavens, the exponential population growth inherent in breeding immortals would have strained the resources even of Eden! Given immortality I can only conclude that sex must have been for pleasure. Eve’s breasts were for Adam’s delight, (and Eve’s!), not for suckling sprogs. My reading has the added benefit of explaining why men have nipples.
The odd ambiguities of this pericope have enabled it to function like a Rorschach inkblot. Readers find what they are looking for. To cite but one easy example, for almost two thousand years now the passage has been used to justify the subordination of women as irrational and sexually dangerous. Eve was seduced by the serpent, went to Adam, wiggled her hips and purred, “Hey sailor, buy me a drink?” In this common reading sex and sin are intimately linked. But that’s not what Genesis says. He was standing there the whole time listening as she talked to the serpent. She considered the question, ate of the fruit, handed it to him, and he ate too. One easy reading of that passage is that he ate because he agreed with her fairly cogent line of reasoning. They actually used the minds god had given them. THAT was the original sin.
So in light of that reading it should come as no surprise that fundamentalists feel the need to control the flow of ideas and information. It explains why they take over school boards, why they organize drives to remove books they don’t like from local libraries. Reason leads to sin. That’s what they see when they look at the inkblot. Knowledge is scary.
It gets worse. One take, either Jewish or medieval Christian, forgive me for forgetting which, was that that Adam disobeyed God so as not to sadden Eve; his ‘sin’ thus came through love of his helpmeet. A bad case of emotional overengineering by the creator, obviously.
As I recall it is a Jewish elaboration, although I can’t cite a source. That Adam. What a great boyfriend! Loyal, devoted. Stupid.
Methinks there are some closet believers here…such a fascination, almost an obsession, with correct interpretation of Jewish and Christian scripture, as if it meant a hill of beans. They are just crappy science fiction, albeit with a smidgen of historical accuracy and an occasional moral lesson. You’d be better off reading the Brothers Grimm or proving the existence of Betty Crocker from her cookbooks.
Stuff, sir. And nonsense.
One possible atheist approach to scriptures is to say it’s all crappy science fiction, and so indeed it is. Another possible atheist approach is to point out that, IF the text were to be taken at face value, then this and that follow, when said this-and-that is highly embarrassing to the believers. These approaches are not mutually exclusive.
Acquisition of a sense of humour is recommended.
I think a better analogy would be proving Betty Crocker’s nonexistence from her cookbooks.
You have to understand your opponent’s position if you are to make a sound case against it. Actually, you have to understand it before you decide if you should make a case against it.
I’m always amazed by strident, militant Atheists who don’t know the first thing about religion. They seem obsessed with knocking down strawmen. There’s an almost desperate denial about so much of the invective, a kind of wishful thinking, proceeding as if the Enlightenment hadn’t died in the trenches of WW I.
Believers are seldom embarrassed–occasionally confounded perhaps, but not embarrassed. In spite of facts and logic, believers will persist in their beliefs, recovering from any momentary setbacks rejuvenated and resolved. This persistence is what makes them believers and is the bright line that sets them apart from thinkers. Efforts to dissuade them from their beliefs are pointless and sap one’s energies. They remain windmills while we joust away.
As for knowledge and understanding of the opponent as a precondition of successful debate, I am amazed (to borrow a verb) that otherwise intelligent, rational, thoughtful atheists would invest time in wrestling the religious pig. Perhaps the reason lies in the thrill of getting muddy; it certainly doesn’t derive from the expectation of victory. If logic and reason were really one’s strong suit, one should know that the person making the claim must provide the proof. While I understand that contempt does not equal refutation, most believers are easily dismissed as fools with little effort. Yet the more intelligent approach is actually indifference. I, for one, couldn’t care less what superstition someone else holds. Why this is considered militancy is beyond me.
The strength of the reaction to my statement makes me wonder why all of you have such a stake in the religion you profess to disbelieve. Why Christianity? I see no point by point dismemberment of Hinduism or Islam in these posts. Is this just a lack of familiarity, or could it be because you are not threatened by religions you actually don’t believe in? My atheism emerged forty years ago as I realized the fundamental absurdity of religion and belief in deities. I have long since abandoned any lingering affection for the religion of my youth, in which I was thoroughly steeped. I don’t pore over sacred texts looking for validation. I don’t construct scripturally based verbal positions with which to thwart my adversaries (and conquer my fears). I don’t worry that I will be ungirded should Mormons knock on my door, or should my Jewish friends offer a blessing before a meal. I don’t really care that I haven’t a mastery of the Old and New Testaments. Why do you?
These posts are much more interesting when we explore the sociological or societal effects of religious practices and belief in the irrational. How has it become necessary to prove one’s atheism under an ad hominem attack?
(1) Even were no believers to be convinced, a proposition abut which I am doubtful, Dwasifar, Urban and I can still have some learned fun together. Or does that fall under your ban, O Blind Jorge?
(2) “I, for one, couldn’t care less what superstition someone else holds.” So what are you doing here, other than to psychoanalyse people you’ve never met and who have done you no harm?
(3) My own systematic theory of religion, as a fourfold ignoble path of technologies for economic, political, social-climbing and emotional ends, applies to absolutely everything. I could certainly do with some more exotic examples, and am indeed finding some in the Heike Monogatori, which is some of my current reading. OTOH it’s easiest to find juicy examples in the Christianity that surrounds us all and regrettably influences our public life in a way that Hinduism or Tibetan Buddhism does not.
(4) “How has it become necessary to prove one’s atheism under an ad hominem attack?” Since you perpetrated the initial ad hominem attack, you should answer your own question.
“Methinks there are some closet believers here…such a fascination, almost an obsession, with correct interpretation of Jewish and Christian scripture, as if it meant a hill of beans.”
I had intended to reply to this silly post in more depth, but then realized that it would be a waste of time as Mr. F either doesn’t read very well or doesn’t bother to think before he starts spouting.
At no point was anyone attenpting to derive a correct interpretation of scriptures. Indeed if he had bothered to read what I actually wrote he would have realized that I was denying that there is a correct interpretation, that I was pointing to the profusion of possibilities. Perhaps Mr. F. doesn’t know what a Rorschach inkblot is, but I suspect he’s just another dogmatic ideologue. Ho hum. He can’t respond to what other people are actually saying because all he has are off-the-rack responses, rhetorical boilerplate.
Or perhaps Mr. F. never got the memo about the 20th century. There’s something almost quaint, very 19th century about his naive “faith” in reason. I had thought to suggest some major scientific and logico/mathematical discoveries of the 20th century that he might want to learn about, but they aren’t secret. Had he any curiosity he would have discovered them on his own. Life is too short to bother trying to have a conversation with someone who isn’t listening, whose responses have nothing to do with anything anyone else said.
This was certainly fun. I know I feel better.
Since religions deserve only mockery and derision, I am providing a link just for that purpose. http://www.cslacker.com/images/funny/signs/street_signs/religions_of_the_world/.
It forgot Stoicism: “So shit happens. Big deal, I can take it.”
And Megachurches: “Shit only happens to those who fail to make generous donations”.