Quote:
Originally Posted by Frances
"The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the Tree of Knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your ****ing mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions." Frank Zappa.
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Ooooh, nice quote.
I'd take the Garden of Eden idea as being a metaphor for when humans started to really manipulate their environment, build permanent shelters, farm and eventually form civilisations. One result (of the many results) of these human developments is the emergence of organised warfare, more effective weapons etc. which are bad side-effects of human ingenuity. There are a lot of other bad effects of human developments, many of which weren't even around when the bible was written.
So, if you look at human advancements from one direction only it looks like they are the cause of most of our troubles. We left the innocence and simplicity of the natural 'garden', the state in which we ate what we found and slept wherever seemed comfortable enough and instead decided to take on the world, to try to understand and then manipulate what we found rather than just accepting everything as it was.
Looking at it from the other side, the fact that most people (even in the 3rd world and despite massive population increase) aren't living in a permanent state of near starvation (poor nutrion, yes, but not starvation mostly), nor all dying of hypothermia during the winter, suggests that even at the basic level, leaving the Garden of Eden was a pretty good idea... because had not developed our technology we'd be spending all day looking for berries, hunting animals, gathering wood and getting rained on while trying to hide beneath trees, just to delay our demise for one more week.
Anyway, apples taste nice. And every time you eat one you're sticking your finger up at God.