No love or desire in Eden without the knowledge of good and evil. http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/genesis-of-desire/video-zornberg_interview.shtml Love that is returned is true and good love. Love, like faith, if not expressed in works and deeds, is dead. Love that is not returned we do not call evil but it is certainly not as good as love that is returned and shared. Let me call it evil then as compared to good. It misses the mark. Love then is subject to the qualifiers of good and evil and without any knowledge of good and evil, love cannot exist. An example of this lack of emotion is shown in this clip. http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...5E7FF56AF1D1A09177855E7FF56AF1D1&FORM=LKVR38# I see life without the knowledge of good and evil, a moral sense in other words, as mankind just being like any other animal on this earth. Is it possible that the myth of Eden was initially invented to indicate the birth of mankind’s emotional awakening to love, hate, and all of our other emotions? God is spirit. Is it possible that without eating of the tree of knowledge, developing a moral sense and the emotions that drive it, becoming spiritual the way God is, as confirmed by God himself who said that mankind had become as Gods, A & E would have just remained as blissfully dumb as other animals? Did they and we have to eat of it to become fully human? Would any of us be silly enough to NOT have done exactly what A & E did and reject this great accomplishment and gift for mankind? Would you reject the ability to love? Regards DL
Very odd! I could have sworn i responded to this yesterday. Oh well, let's give it another try. Okay. But that doesn't mean unrequited love is less real - it just hurts more. Most shared love is expressed in deeds and words; it isn't anything like faith, and how does inaction kill either one? If you go around calling schoolgirl crushes evil, what word will you use for genocide? I get that this is a rhetorical stratagem, but it really does miss the mark. You never had a dog, right? Or seen a lemur with her baby. And what's wrong with that? No. All those emotions were present in the world, in many recognizable forms and expressions, long before humans identified as such. All of them. Do you know that a dumb horse can hold a grudge for years? No. Check that quote again: "Indeed! The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. And now perhaps he will put forth his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!" I won't insist that the"us" refers to the Sumerian pantheon, but the problem was definitely not spirituality but forbidden knowledge: the danger of immortality. Probably, but for a different reason. The Eden story refers to that turning point in human development when we realized that we could effect our environment. No longer accept the world as given, but manipulate it, change it to suit ourselves. That is the original sin; our ultimate downfall - the human tragedy.
It is a human tragedy to recognize that we can affect reality. If you say so. Not. I see that as a blessing. As to original sin, you might note that those who actually have the authority over the O T, the Jews, do not believe in the Christian concept of original sin. Christians did not usurp the taditional interpretations when they usurped the Jewish God. They reversed our elevation to our fall. Regards DL
