ORIGINAL SINNERS? ADAM AND EVE?

Christians today are ashamed of the Adam and Eve tale though it was taken seriously by Jesus and the apostles.  Some argue that the fantastic and insane stories in the Bible are metaphorical.  But nobody agrees on what stories exactly are insane.  You end up with no useful way to tell metaphorical from that which is non-figurative.   And some dare to pick any story and butcher it with, "This line is meant to be history and this one is a figure."

Original sin, the doctrine that when Adam the first man ate the forbidden fruit according to the first book of the Bible that this was a terrible infraction of divine law that cut him off God and made us born in the same rebellious state.  This was supposed to be why we needed the atonement of Christ to make up for this so that we could be put right with God.  No good God would let us be born in such a state for he would want us to be with him in every moment of precious time.  The Church says that the human weakness in us is evidence for this original sin.  But it is just evidence for weakness and that is all.  God is universally insulted to justify the claim that nobody is saved without Jesus for all have descended from Adam and inherited his antagonism towards God like a virus.  

People took stories like Adam and so on literally in ages past.  Theologians today who say it is symbolic cannot give us a Bible verse that says it was.  They are making assumptions and treating them as the word of God.  To find absurdities and contradictions in the Adam story and claim that they indicate that the story is symbolically true but not literally true is extremely dishonest.  If we use that approach all the time we will have to start saying that every rubbish story say in paganism is true.  Adam did not exist so original sin is a lie.

The Bible often crafts "true" stories to teach us lessons.  Eg the story of underage Mary having a dangerous pregnancy that God approved of and specifically asked for implies that the principle behind abortion, "An unborn baby does not have an equal right to life with the mother" is evil and wrong.  Adam and Eve is meant to answer questions such as, "Who started off human life?  Why do men want to marry women?  Why is God's good creation so bad now?"

Adam and Eve are clearly denied to be products of evolution.  The story says that Adam refused God when he offered him a companion from the animals and that means apes and whatever else was around then.  There was no woman. 

INTERPRETATION ONE, Genesis clearly shows that God bringing the animals to Adam to find a helpmeet - literally "a helper and partner worthy of and suited to him and complimentary to him" is a test to show that a man needs a woman.  It is intended as well to indicate that bestiality is wrong. But it is clearly homophobic.  But it does in fairness show that a man and woman are equal and together are amazing and incredible.   It implies a woman has a good influence on a man and is to be his beneficial advisory.

INTERPRETATION TWO, God is incapable.  He stupidly decides that it is not good for Adam to be alone and brings him animals to mate with.  In those religious times, goddesses and gods were partly or fully animals and engaged in bestiality. We are not told if Adam tried sex with them and didn't like it or got bored.  The animals being brought to Adam would seem to be a hint that this is what happened. Adam's rib is cloned by God and the account never says Adam consented to this.  If there was no suffering in that world then why did God put him to sleep?  The implication is that God wanted to exploit him.  He didn't care about his choice.  The rib is built up into a new person and it is a woman.  It must have been gender-changed then.  She is presented as a last resort.

This INTERPRETATION ONE is taken by the New Testament writers.  Jesus says the story shows that marriage is a union of lifelong commitment involving man and woman for their bodies fit. What woman means is anybody's guess for in that age female children were expected to get pregnant as soon as they could.  Even today in some systems a girl is called woman. The serpent tells the woman in Genesis that when God told her to eat of any tree but one he meant all the trees were out of bounds.  She in childlike fashion agrees with him.  This is not an adult.  [If she is then the story is misogynistic implying that women are stupid that they forget what they hear and imagine what they heard.]  The implications are horrific.  Adam was a child abuser and she was a child bride.  Jesus sensed this for he went out of his way to ban females from divorcing though he knew they were forced to wed too young and impregnated too young.

Also the teaching is paraphrased in 1 Corinthians 7 by Paul who writes that the alternative to marriage is sexual immorality so a man should have sexual relations with his own wife and she with her husband.  He says it is not about the man asking the woman for sex but him in love sacrificing himself to deal with her needs.  He says it is not about the woman asking the man for sex but about her sacrificing in love to deal with his needs.  This implicitly says that any sex outside of man-woman marriage is a sin.

The man and woman together are the image of God.

The declaration later that man will be the master of his wife is a punishment for their sin.  They were originally totally equal.

Psalm 8:5 says that God has made human beings only a bit lower than the angels. This rejects the common notion today that we are rather just a little higher than the ape-like creatures we came from.

Genesis 2:7 says that Adam’s life began with his first breath. Christians warn we cannot say the same thing about babies for Adam was made from the ground not a uterus so it is not the same thing.  If evolution is true, then Adam was alive like a foetus but did not become a person until God breathed in him.  This would allow abortion up to first breath.  If Genesis is right then this argument falls apart.

The story says that Adam was asked not to touch the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  God made this law.  Touching the tree was not wrong in itself.  God made it wrong.  The story implies that sin is not exactly doing harm - it is the disobedience to divine authority that is the problem.  Original sin if it exists then causes the wish to unify law and morality in the name of God.

Theologians say that the tree was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil because anybody who touched the tree would know experientially what it is to stop being good and become evil.  They deny that Adam was going to get a purely intellectual knowledge of these things without experiencing them. 

Born again seems to differ according to religious persuasion.  To a Catholic it means the start of God deciding to have a loving relationship with you at baptism. To the Protestant it is the same thing but they often think it happens when you accept Jesus consciously as your substitute who earned salvation for you by paying for your sins for you. The term is terribly insulting to good people who are not believers for it implies that they are spiritually lacking and defective. It is really no better than racism especially when it teaches that people who have never heard the gospel will not be saved and will have to pay for their own sins in Hell. Even to suggest that God might find some other way to save them implies that they might not be saved and they might be ripe for Hell. That is nasty too.
 
The new birth allegedly removes original sin which causes our bias towards sin so it results in a holy life. Whether we are talking about born –again Protestants or Catholics most of them do not act in any remarkably virtuous way so the new birth is a conscious dose of quackery and deception. No concern is showing for proving that the baptism ritual actually helps. It is not about helping babies but about imposing the foolishness of religion on them.

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