Did Eve and Adam ever repent of their despicable sin?

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If Adam and Even are not buried here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs

then, who is?

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According to the Christians who have twisted the Old Testament, Eve and Adam invented sin.

Eve and Adam invented sin by refusing to obey God's primary commandment which was: Do not eat the organic fruit in his Garden of Paradise.

Since Eve and Adam ate the forbidden organic fruit, they became radioactive...oops...they stained their skins and it was necessary for the Christians to invent a stain remover - aka water baptism of John the Baptist - to wash away the stain from Eve and Adam. That's what Christianity is based on today: get baptised - the organic stain of Eve and Adam will be washed away and one receives a free ticket to the new Garden of Paradise - heaven in the sky located above the City of Jerusalem.

(Simplified/oversimplified)

X-reference: The Interpreter's House - Book 1 - Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan) - Room one in the Interpreter's House (think dust on floor, broom, water)

http://www.pilgrimsprogressthemovie.com/

Eve and Adam - their despicable sin - is why Christianity's baptism was invented by the Christians. In order to attract followers, Christianity had to invent a problem (original sin of Eve and Adam) and then offer a product which fixes it all (for a fee) - water baptism.

It's the for profit business of religion veiled as a non-profit, tax-exempt religion.

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http://www.beliefnet.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Hous ... rtnerships

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_tale

Other

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Well, there's no evidence in either the Old Testament or the New Testament that Adam and Eve invented herbicides and pesticides and sprayed them in the Garden of Eden to increase the crop yield. From the Bible, it appears the Garden of Eden was 100% organic - certified by God himself.

In the beginning, God created a 100% organic earth (according to the Bible).

The ultimate bully. Set up your victims to fail. When they fail make a massive deal out of it to shame them. Then make them pay for the rest of their lives, and everyone elses.

If God knows everything, then He knows all possible outcomes. The world we live in just happened to be the outcome Adam chose. It's not our fault, but we do have to live with the consequences. If you actually believe in and trust God, it's not quite the worst possible consequence. All things considered, God did the best possible thing in response to Adam's sin.

I'm not going to respond to issues related to anti-religious sentiment. What I WILL address are the first two points.

Adam and Eve were "born yesterday" in a manner of speaking. All this means is that they have the responsibility of being adults without a lifetime of experience. This is evident in their naïvety and gullibility. Being gullible doesn't make one a bad person or a sinner. It just means you need more time to learn what you need to know. The Tree in question was NEVER more than Adam and Eve could possibly resist. The hardest lesson, in my opinion, was learning to completely trust and rely upon God. They never had a reason not to trust God. And I think it is that mistaken mistrust that is the ultimate author of all human evil.

Now, the next point is incorrect. Adam and Eve DID know the difference between right and wrong before they ate from the tree. Right=eat from every tree except THAT one. Wrong=eat from THAT tree. They knew that. There is another Tree that only has a single vague mention in Genesis, and that is the Tree of Life. "Every tree" includes the Tree of Life. By incurring upon themselves a sinful nature they disqualified from eternal life in an earthly paradise created exclusively for them. Expulsion from Eden represents separation from this other tree. The irony is Christians believe in another "tree of life" in the form of both the cross Jesus was crucified on and in the person of Jesus Himself, representing the root and branches of life itself. I wonder, and this is a matter of interpretation, if the Tree of Life in the garden of Eden was not Jesus in a metaphorical sense. The Bible DOES reveal that the Tree of Life is in the Kingdom of Heaven, therefore we are assured of a spiritual return to the Garden in a time when evil and sin will cease to exist.

What Adam and Eve DID by eating from the Tree of Knowledge (etc.) was, most importantly, disobedience and, by gaining knowledge of good and evil, recognize that they had brought sin upon themselves and were therefore (with the knowledge) responsible for their actions. The only cure for sinful worthlessness is death. God allowed them to live lives in repentance at a very unfortunate cost to themselves and, ultimately, to God Himself.

Wombat asked a question I find very interesting: Because Adam and Eve discovered right from wrong by gaining forbidden knowledge, is it a sin for a man to look at his naked wife? The assumption here is that nakedness is inherently sinful. This is something I've wondered for a long time, and I think I've figured out the answer--something I stumbled on when I played piano for my cousin's wedding, one of the pastors seemed preoccupied with the idea of nakedness, something my wife and I found at once both amusing and disturbing. Adam and Eve were naked in the garden prior to their sin. They obviously knew right from wrong because God had given them specific instructions on what they could and could not do. Because they lacked a sinful nature at this time, they were incapable of sinning. Therefore nakedness cannot be a sin. If nakedness WAS a sin, then that makes Adam and Eve sinful BEFORE the fall. And because they weren't sinful before the fall, nakedness can't be considered a sin.

So why were they naked and ashamed after gaining forbidden fruit and forbidden knowledge? Clothing, covering, or hiding is an attempt to cover inward evil and shame. As long as Adam and Eve remained sinless, they had nothing to hide from God. But knowing right from wrong and recognizing their disobedience, Adam and Eve DID have something to be ashamed of. They may not have been able to explain it, but they knew that they could never allow God to see them as they were after their sin. Hence the need to cover up. No doubt God knew what was happening immediately when He confronted them. And they knew that appearing before God naked when they had something to hide would be unacceptable. They also had to learn the hard lesson that because God sees the heart of human beings, there was nothing they themselves could do to cover or hide their sins. It took God Himself providing the first blood sacrifice (by killing an animal) and providing them animal skin to wear as an acceptable covering.

When a husband and wife are together naked, they are considered "one flesh." There's nothing to fear within such close familial relations. What IS wrong, however, is exposing one's shame (nakedness) to the rest of the world and before God (in a physical sense) because it is indicative of one's foolish assessment of himself as somehow exempt from the laws of God and man. This is a matter of conscience, of course, but I, for one, am doing the rest of the world a favor when I refuse to leave my house without putting a shirt on first! But in marriage, being naked in front of your mate is a form of total submission. It says "here I am, faults and all, and I'm trusting you to accept me." I look nothing like the guy my wife met 10 years ago when I was 50 lbs. lighter and before most of my hair fell out. Yet she accepts my half-bald head and all three spare tires. Nor have I rejected her because she has a bright red c-section scar that wasn't there when we first met. We are ALL naked before God, despite how much we want to cover or deny our faults. And just as husbands and wives (should) stand naked before each other in total acceptance, it teaches us a lesson about how God accepts us. Every time I hear about someone getting divorced, it breaks my heart because it only reveals two more people who just don't "get" it. If you can totally accept your mate, no matter how quirky they act or how unattractive they may become through various stages of life, then you can understand how God can totally accept those who believe in Him.

A completely different way of looking at it:

My alternative view is that it's a metaphor for what happened when we became the human species. Our brains got more complex and needed to be pretty large in babies so babies could start doing warp-speed learning immediately. That change in brains was "eating from the tree of knowledge". At the same time, we started routinely walking upright instead of just doing it sometimes like other primates, freeing up our hands but making it necessary for women to have pelvises just a little too small to painlessly fit giant baby heads. The combination of giant baby heads ("eating from the tree of knowledge") and smaller pelvises made childbirth more painful for human women than for the females of other species. It is the price women pay for having such smart babies and being able to walk upright. In Genesis this painful childbirth is framed as God's punishment. But I see this not as a crime and punishment story (even though it's told as such) but as a metaphor for what must inevitably happen when we became the species we are.

The other "punishment" for eating from the tree of knowledge? We got cast out of the Garden of Eden and have to slog through life always worrying and struggling. You could see it as a punishment. Or you could see it as the natural consequence of turning into humans and gaining the intelligence to look into the future and plan for it. We became a smart species but the price to pay for that is that we can no longer live in the moment (Garden of Eden). We are aware of our own mortality and the mortality of everyone we love. We know that nothing can last and we always have to plan for things which involves an awful lot of stress and worry. Things don't woprk out the way we plan. We have to think up new plans. Chaos is always looming. It's a constant struggle- it is being cast out of Eden.


The awareness of nakedness also came with the expanded brain. Animals don't think endlessly about sex or their bodies. They have a short and well-defined mating season. Sex is important for an allotted span of time per year. And it's completely absent at other times and completely irrelevent. But not us. Another change that came with becoming human was the lack of mating season. Sex could happen at any random time. Or never. It's always on our minds because there is no "season" like there is for other animals. So in that sense, when we became human, we became aware of sex and our bodies in a way that other animals just don't need to be.

That's my way of looking at it. I think that the people who wrote Genesis noted these differences between us and other species. There are some aspects of being human that are painful and other species don't seem to have this pain. They saw the world through a God-centered lens and created a story that would explain how becoming smart could be something punishable because that would be the only way to explain how intelligence could have painful consequences. I'm not religious. I believe in evolution. So I look at this human pain as a natural consequence of the changes we went through to become human.

If you take God and punishment out of the Genesis story, you are left with a very detailed explanation of the painful consequences of certain evolutionary changes that happened for us to become human.

Peter Redgrove wrote a book called 'The Wise Wound'...it's about the psychology and mythology of menstruation, and it makes the intriguing link between the two trees of Eden and the two poles of the human female menstrual cycle.

Most female mammals have an estrus cycle, in which they only get the urge to mate when they're fertile. Humans and some higher primates have a menstrual cycle, in which the female can have a desire to mate at any time of the month. Redgrove says plucking the fruit of the Tree of Life symbolizes sex at ovulation, when a baby is most likely to be conceived; plucking the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge symbolizes the other pole, non-reproductive sex at menstruation - sex oriented more towards emotional bonding, pleasure, and, he claims, altered states of consciousness. It's been pointed out that religious teachings which ban non-reproductive sex are actually an evolutionary step backwards - trying to push women back to a pre-human status as merely breeding animals, rather than partners in a relationship.

(BTW, the apple? Is a Latin pun from the Church fathers. Malus = apple, malum = evil. Bearing in mind they covered themselves with fig leaves, it's logical to think the forbidden tree might have been thought of as a fig tree, but who knows?)

Please don't take offense, but...

EW!

Seriously, though, I just can't wrap my brain around the garden of Eden being a sexual or asexual metaphor.

I also don't buy into Yahweh worship/Christianity as prohibiting sex for pleasure. A lot of people miss the Mosaic law regulating sexual intercourse with slaves. Anyone else and it's adultery, punishable by death! My question is why are SLAVES permitted? Presumably to act as surrogates for those women who cannot conceive and produce heirs for their men. But come ON!! ! Is that REALLY all that was going on? I strongly doubt it. It's the sinfulness of men's hearts and depravity of their minds that warranted such rules. If adhering to a religion meant no nooky, I doubt it ever would have come to that. And that's only ONE example.

U.S. Grant.

The Caves at Machpellah have a lot of myth wrapped about them. Has anyone found a male skeleton without a navel there?

ruveyn

well, God created Adam in his own image, from the dust.



Knowledge, in which a collection of them are evil and one or few are good.

Evil=other philosophies, religions and customs, and the freedom to pursuit any of them or create/pursuit a new different philosophy,

Good=only one 'true' religion and set of customs, rejection of any philosophy/idea/fact that undermines it.

Rather like modern education, isn't it?
Tempt a lot of people into college who really shouldn't be there.
Encourage them to borrow $50,000 in student loans.

Then when they flunk out or can't get a job with their worthless degree you squeeze them for the rest of their lives, taking half the money they make at their pathetic minimum wage job.

I guess "The Serpent" is still around and still selling that "Tree of Knowledge"
I think the same Serpent is in charge of sending military recruiters to high schools.
(Trust me. You are going to have a GREAT time in Iraq)

Interesting comment. I definately think the idea of god has gone straight to some peoples heads. People like our leaders and those who seek power over others. We are all bullied in one way or another.

Yes I like the way you look at it. I often have thought if it was a metaphor for the human condition of being self aware to a high degree. People living 4000 years ago who wrote this stuff down were probably very aware that humans were not like the rest of the animals in that we think about such things and can articulate them (albeit in a very allegorical way). I think it is a tradgety that people take the bible literally and I often wonder if it was ever written with that intention. I wonder if the people who wrote it could see us now would they be amazed that we are still disccussing it, even though we have much greater ways of articulating human evolution and development.

The Genisis creation myth is stuck on us like a wad of chewing gum on the bottom of a shoe.

ruveyn

It's not a "Tree of Knowledge." It's a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Very specific. Adam was in charge of tending the Garden and naming all living things. Obviously it was not God's plan to keep Adam ignorant. Knowing Good from Evil carries with it the responsibility to act upon that knowledge and accept the consequences of failure. It brought with it a sinful nature because Adam sinned in eating from it. Without taking part in sin, one does not have the nature to sin and therefore does not sin. Assigning ALL knowledge to the Tree is a false assumption.

If Adam was in charge but he didn't know the difference between good and evil how can you blame him?

If you were to hire a child to run your billion dollar business are you going to crucify him the first time he makes a mistake?