The Trouble With Adam and Eve.

Previously published on 'This Is The Awful Truth".

Adam & Eve are getting a media revival:

Here the New Republic weighs in.
Here The Economist weighs in.
Here answersingenesis.org responds to The Economist article.

Cue my entry into the fray. If no other reason satisfies, consider it my 'seeing something' and 'saying something'.

Let's start with a few ground rules.

• While everything herein is a valid point or criticism, this is mainly for the sake of entertainment. Someone thinking through something they've just taken for granted for a long time would just be a really pleasant side effect.
• You do not have a right to not be offended. The purpose here wasn't to offend you in the first place, but know if it happens, I have no duty or obligation to protect anyone from ideas or arguments, either now or at any point in the future.
• I do, on the other hand, have an obligation to the truth, and stating it when I deem it appropriate or necessary, and if I've taken the time to write about something, rest assured, I did so because it really feels appropriate and necessary.
• Not one point here is of my creation. I merely compiled a list and added some commentary. I cannot claim authorship on anything beyond my own commentary. I stand on the shoulders of giants smarter than myself. It's a good habit I can't recommend enough. 

Got it? Good. Onward.

Let's start with an aesthetic touch:

Belly Buttons
A&E Belly Button meme
Sure, it's not fair to hold the bible accountable for the depictions of painters doing works based on scripture, but if your argument for the validity of the bible is that it was inspired by God, then it does and should apply further to works earnestly based on that bible as well. At some point, if you believe in this story, and you expect others to believe it as well, you must contend with either the validity of handed down information, which the bible itself is, the effects of interpretation of such information, whether by choice or happenstance, and/or the idea of a perfect designer and whether or not they could create something less than perfect, including a point at which that perfection fails, especially as it relates to something created in their own image.

Who wrote Genesis?
Where better to get this answer than truthingenesis.com?
http://www.truthingenesis.com/2013/01/03/who-wrote-the-book-of-genesis/
Note this from that page, with not the slightest hint of irony:

 Keep in mind that Moses edited Genesis from 10 eyewitness accounts. The accounts were probably written on clay tablets. Noah would have taken these tablets on the ark with him. The fact that people wrote down there account before Moses did does not mean that they got it right. The skeptics will say that the Samarian legend was written before Moses was even alive. They then imply that Moses copied from them. This is simply not so. If you have several people that are eyewitnesses to an event and they all write a story about what they saw, the first one to publish his story isn’t necessarily the one that got the story right. The fact that somebody published first doesn’t mean that they got the story right.

Let's say anyone takes seriously the idea that even a portion of the Genesis story actually had 'eyewitnesses', and that that one or all ten of those eyewitnesses stated exactly and in perfect detail what they recalled, and their memories were perfect as well, it is all for naught because according to this, Moses edited the whole thing himself, with Moses clearly not being an eyewitness himself. If that's not suspect enough, think a moment on who would exactly be an eyewitness to the Adam and Eve story anyway; nobody has ever claimed legitimately that God authored any of it, which now leaves us with two stupid teenagers and a talking, dust-eating snake blamed for the entire fallen state of humanity. Reliable witnesses all, I'm assured.

The Appeal to Authority
Tell me how these two teenagers would recognize any one authority as greater or more beneficial or more deserving of obedience than any other before eating the fruit from the 'tree of good and evil'. Why would a voice from the sky, or an old wizard kicking around the garden, hold any more sway over a voice from a serpent, especially before having allegedly gained the wisdom of recognizing good and evil? This is a worse paradox than having days before creating the sun on the recognized and universally accepted fourth unit of time derived solely from the earth rotating around the sun. Moses, were he the actual editor. was a terrible one, to say the least, especially in light of:

The Serpent Spoke The Truth.
So, God tells them they could eat from any of the trees in the garden, except for the tree in the center, for if they did, if they even so much as touched that tree, they would die. Snake comes along and says nope, you won't die. So the female idiot touches the tree and doesn't die. She picks some fruit from the tree and it still doesn't kill her. She eats the fruit and still nothing.

Consider the implication also that she got Adam to eat after she partook and gained the wisdom herself. Nobody much takes that into account; I wonder why.

 She gets the boy to eat it and she's still kicking and so is he. Along comes the allegedly all knowing, all seeing wizard, who has to ask where they are because they successfully hide from him, and then has to ask where they got informed about nakedness and if they had eaten from the tree, which is really odd, in retrospect, for a guy who allegedly can't be surprised. That must be why Eve detected the anger emanating from this really loving guy, so she tried to smooth things over by volunteering that she was deceived by the one who was honest, to the one that did the deceiving. Regardless of the intent of the character, the snake spoke nothing but truth, at least to Eve, at least inasmuch as this episode says. The best possible scenario is that this was a case of shoddy editing again.

I've seen people equate the boot from the garden with death, but even if this is the case, it wasn't touching the tree or eating the fruit that caused that. It was the judgement of the temperamental and absent-minded wizard that did that, and the worst possible punishment for, what must be classified as, a silly rule, that the temperamental and absent-minded wizard just could not bend on, even though he is allegedly capable of anything. This is the same wizard that left the one taboo tree right in the center, as an obvious temptation, with two kids who had no understanding of temptation, no means of fighting temptation and no reason to fight temptation. This was all a part of some plan as well? Terrible planning is the mark of a terrible planner. Or a still terrible editor.

I offer 'Moses, you're fired.', summoned with my best impression of Donald Trump, reinforced with the pointing flourish and minus the orangutan comb-over.

Lillith.
You're not familiar with Adam's first wife? Or that she,and not the devil, was originally considered the serpent who whispered in Eve's ear those tender truths that only a girlfriend can deliver, and that those same early paintings with the belly buttons on the idiot children depicted that same serpent with breasts? Does this maybe hurt the idea of biblical/traditional marriage more than gay marriage ever could? Maybe you don't know the story quite as well as you have believed all this time. Care to check a little deeper? Don't take my word for any of it. Don't stop digging with just this link either. 'Succumb to your curiosity', offered in my best dust eating snake impression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith

What About The Children?
If you are a young earth creationist, you have to find a way that you can start with two people only, advance their population to millions, wipe out the majority with a global flood leaving less than a dozen people, remove all traces of evidence of that flood, and then get a population of millions again, and this is before we get to the tower tantrum with the lightning blast that imbued the airborne with the traits and qualities of Eskimos and Africans and Asians, and everything in between, alike in one fell strike. One of you should hire a good writer to put that together. And a good editor while you're at it.

For the rest, still trying to cling onto this story, you now have Eve being a clone replicated from Adam's rib, which means he was, for lack of a kinder way to state it, fucking himself. That's gonna get you some messed up kids, dontchathink?

Where did Cain's wife come from? And how do we avoid family picnics like these, aside from just staying out of the bible belt?

How were their children and then their children's children not mutants? Just because the author(s) of the story had no apparent understanding of genetics(which we won't hold them responsible for) does not mean reality is not a consideration(which we will hold those who refuse to acknowledge or accept reality most certainly responsible and accountable).

If incest was alright then but not now, how can you possibly even say with a straight face that there is (a)an objective morality, (b) a standard of traditional marriage, (c) a necessity of anyone to heed the injunctions about sex outside of wedlock or lust and (d) the ability at the end of all that to walk away with a cohesive narrative, that not only can you communicate, but compel others to believe? How do you reconcile all of that nonsense?

Scapegoating.
At the worst, if this story were even remotely true, Eve made a mistake, and then caused Adam to make the same mistake. After which, they were cast out of paradise, resulting in, among other things, women necessarily having to now suffer during childbirth, strictly as a punishment and snakes now supposedly forced to eat dust, which seems to have gone out of fashion, presumably once other options were recognized. This later leads to a woman being spiritually raped, who then goes through the unnecessary and painful process of delivering the physically manifest child of her rapist, who in turn is forced to be tortured unto his death as a salvation stopgap, which still leaves every living human creature born after them a sinner or a slave, and this was supposedly planned from the beginning, and this was supposedly the best and/or only way conceivable by someone who is supposedly not just loving and just, but 'all-loving', 'all-knowing' and 'all-capable', all done supposedly under the dual umbrellas of justice and objective morality, and wrapped up as a gift of supposed 'free will' which is by all accounts punishable if you actually utilize it.

The only lesson I personally gather from this is that some people will eat just about anything, their mental or physical well-being be damned.

It's only an allegory?
First things first. I am going to require my own code-breaking device that allows one to make the jump from one story to the next in scripture and say with any certainty which stories are supposedly historical fact and which are just helpful fictions. If props aren't required, please just explain the standard you know to say which is which. I won't hold my breath waiting for either.

The story, nay, the whole collection of stories, have many qualities that paint it as only a horrible fiction. Specifically in reference to the Adam and Eve story, not only does it not comport with our present scientific understandings; but even what we consider common sense shudders at the consideration of its validity.

It must just be a myth then, right? I'm fine with that, but you probably shouldn't be if you consider yourself a Christian. Christianity becomes a myth, necessarily, in its entirety, if you do so.

Without the Adam and Eve fable being real, God would have had no reason to await or arrange an immaculate conception, or impregnate her with a child, not only out of wedlock, not only without her consent, but with the only purpose of that child being betrayed and destroyed as a display to be beheld and by extent a measure of penance for that god's inability to change his mind and satisfy a plot worthy of having an Acme anvil land on his head ala Wile E Coyote. Once you've thrown your hands up and said that this one section is a fable and we can't expect it to be true and historical; once you've gone that far, you've destroyed the whole preposterous thing that flows and follows from it. There's no reason to accept any of it, up to and including the existence, deeds or injunctions of that god, as anything other than a wholesale and full scale terrible fiction. The ship has sailed and you are, sorry to say, left behind, as it were, there on the dock.

You do really have an all or nothing proposition here, and frankly, the nothing part looks to be winning, at least as far as popularity contests go.
-------------------------------
Agree? Tell a friend or someone else you think needs to see this.
Disagree? You can scowl and storm off to something more agreeable. You can also call names and attack me before you go; not that either will get you desirable results. If you have a good argument instead, then make a good case why anything here is wrong, then tell a friend or someone else you think needs to see this and they can also weigh in.

Thank you for your time and consideration in either case.