#the tree of knowledge of good and evil

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Right from the beginning the bible teaches that God has never had any trust or 'faith' in humanity. If he did, he would have created humans with knowledge and trusted us to make good decisions. Instead he put knowledge out of our reach and made it a crime to seek it. Why have faith in something that has obviously never had faith in you?"

Why do you worship a god who openly despises its own creations?

[a-pining-tree]

You ever write a story with some religious aesthetic elements cause they’re pig then realize you’ve accidentally altered your own religious beliefs in the process

[edelblumie]

Fan-comic #3 (it's just the one page) for @stnaf-vn (#1 | #2 | OMEN)

Features an oc (oc info)

Well, I hope it works out well for BOTH these crazy kids. Probably won’t though... MOST of those branches look barren…

SH’s cute, emotionally inarticulate loner boy has grown up into a suave, psychologically manipulative loner man! And they just can’t keep up with his mind game bs =_=

… …but never underestimate SH… …

The End ^.^

y’know what, song rec: Paper Boats by Darren Korb

[just-xtian-thoughts]

"The knowledge of good and evil" has come to mean for me that the implications are that our use of tools led us to thinking abstractly about everying, which turned into a desire to consider everything as just a utility, something to be retooled for our personal benefit, inconsiderate of all else.

The reason Adam & Eve covering themselves out of shame was because suddenly, they realised that they too could be seen as a "utility" to someone else. Being naked now meant being vulnerable; more easily exploited, and easy to break. It's telling, that the very next chapter shows Cain utilizing a rock for murder.

Not that I'm against human ingenuity or engineering (unless it's stuff like weaponry or Ai), since it doesn't seem like God was ever against us having it. It's perhaps the only way in which we resemble him in any way. But I do wonder sometimes, about how our brains and hormones would've been wired with the extra space there'd be from not having to be thinking about the potential harm(s) that any and every man-made object, be it physical, social, societal, or whatever, could cause...

[dolxiba]

sydpc is so samson and delilah coded. btw

[discworldwitches]

the way the basic idea is free will doesn’t exist but like genesis sort of deals w that right away

[eats-the-stars]

everybody who went to a private catholic school name the craziest personal belief an instructor lectured the class on.

i'll go first: mentally disabled people are free of original sin, just like animals, so they get a free pass to heaven

[goatbeard-goatbeard]

I’ve seen the plans

companion post // previous piece (Uriel)

can’t stop thinking about the absolutely bone-chilling implications of a pre-Fall angel seeing the plans for humans. fallen angels are involved in those plans! a lot!

[elletromil]

Do you think the real reason Crowley tempted Eve into eating the forbidden apple was because he wanted more beings around who didn't blindly believed that everything God said was the end all be all?

That maybe he wanted to find out if the reason he fell was truly because he was evil?

[wandering-free-and-queer]

I need to stop and take a step back from this project lol

[emperornorton47]

Genesis revised

[relationaltherapist]

Living out of the knowledge of good and evil is the basis of legalism. It is where we decide for ourselves. It is where we choose based on our own values, seek to determine what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad. It is the human mind constantly evaluating everything on the basis of one question - is it right or is it wrong?

Self-condemnation and self-justification are to the fore.

We bind ourselves in a constant dilemma of trying to work out the moral value of every action.

Maybe we need to take time and ask the Holy Spirit to show us if there are any judgements lurking. Are there ways in which I have judged others and myself and thereby have been trying to live under the Law and its curse?

[shirahchante]

Adam and Eve

I want to be naked with you Like Adam and Eve But I don’t want to be here when Jesus leave. Hear more about the story of Adam and Eve on Perfect Body! podcast. God bless, Shirah Chante

[thebardostate]

Is that the whole story?

No, it isn't.

The Adversary is actually on God's payroll. It's a classic Good Cop/Bad Cop play. Think about it, why would God create the Tree of Knowledge unless He (I'll observe OP's pronouns for God here) secretly wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit the whole time? God told them No. God said they would die if they ate it. All these conditions and fine print, like a high speed disclaimer in a pharmaceutical ad. How the hell are Adam and Eve supposed to understand the concepts of "dying" or "working" when they live in the Garden of Eden where such things are unknown? How were they even supposed to imagine it?

They weren't. God knew perfectly well they wouldn't understand and would disobey Him and eat the Apple, but first He had a problem: how to put the idea into their heads to disobey Him? For this is what humanity had to do to have Free Will, but God couldn't very well order Adam and Eve to disobey Him: if they obeyed Him, then they would be disobeying Him; and if they disobeyed Him, then they would be obeying Him. This was a logical paradox that could only be resolved if their disobedience to God was an exercise of their own Free Will.

Enter the Serpent, an Angel of God in disguise. God instructed the Serpent to tempt them into disobedience. Eve was the first human to acquire Free Will. She was in fact the first person we can recognize as truly human, with flaws and a mind of her own.

After kicking them out of Eden (read: being born into our world) God spends the entire rest of the Bible trying to wrest Free Will back from us by demanding our blind obedience to His will, as enthusiastically aided in recent times by self-interested orthodox evangelical Christians. Perhaps this is part of the ruse, to constantly force each generation to grapple with God's Word anew. Or perhaps each generation has to figure out for itself that a God who demands blind obedience at all times is not worthy of their worship. Even God casts a shadow.

TL; DR. The Adversary is God's elegant way of conning us into having Free Will, which entails keeping our con going through all the generations of humanity. The Gnostic Christians got this, and had a very different read on Genesis and the role of the Serpent - one which the Early Christian Church vigorously suppressed.