Adam and Eve: Did we miss the point?

Discussion in 'Philosophy' started by Maryed Man, Sep 7, 2012.

  1. So everyone knows about the story of Adam and Eve. Whether you believe this is true or not, I propose this little story as more of an insight into human behavior. So, while reading this, just pretend that the story of Adam and Eve existed, this is purely rhetorical. A fable if you will.

    So what if the Garden of Eden was really an orchard of sorts? A wild, vast orchard of fruits, and vegetables, and flowers and whatnot. And dotted among this orchard are apple trees, vibrant and green, their flowers blooming full in the summer temperatures. And bees nested in the trees, multitudes of them. Every day, they would go out and pollinate the flowers of the apple trees, allowing them to thrive and produce fruit. Of course they also pollinated the rest of the garden and everything worked. But God said now Adam, and Eve, you can have anything in this garden but you cannot eat the apple. For the inside the apple is the life of the tree. When this apple falls, a new tree will bloom, and the bees will thrive again another year, relying on the apple blossoms for their pollen, and thus their life. In turn they will pollinate all these other fruits for you to enjoy, as long as you do not eat the apple.

    In the end, Adam and Eve still ate the apple. And it was not that one apple that doomed them. It was the taste they got for the rest of the apples, and thus the life of the trees, thus the life of the bees, and then all the fruits the bees pollinated.

    So the tradeoff was this - we traded peace, paradise, and utopia for self pleasure, domination, and "free will". And here we have been ever since.

    This was just an idea that occurred to me while being blitzed out of my mind, and even if you're someone who doesn't believe in the story of Adam and Eve (such as myself), I think it's more about what the story says. I wish I was a good writer and could put that into a nice depicting story, but I cannot, not under this time constraint anyhow haha
     
  2. Why would this apply to just one plant? Why not all the plants?

    As little as I'll literally interpret the story, I see it pretty simply;

    Adam and Eve are kids, God is the parent. They disobey, and he determines they can take care of themselves. Coincidentally, their disobedience results in Eve beginning her menstrual cycle. So they're kids being pushed out upon reaching sexual maturity.
     
  3. It's a bible fable, it's the idea behind it not the facts, we've all already agreed the bible doesn't depend on facts :p

    But if you must have a literal reason, then if the bee population was large enough it would depend on a staple flower to provide the honey (thus the apple trees), and as the tree population grew so would the bees and the garden around it. But it was dependent on the trees as the main source of pollen and thus life. The gardens life would then be dependent on the bees, and the ever growing orchard of trees to keep everything growing to be bigger, accommodate a larger human race, and animal race. But with apple consumption the trees don't spread, and stay where they are, and eventually die off to disease and whatnot.

    And sure they could plant but this was before man was "self reliant" in theory, right?
     

  4. The reason I don't follow your reason is bees aren't the only pollinators, and don't just go to one type of flower to get the nectar for the honey they make. Adam and Eve were free to eat anything else in the garden but from that one tree, which is colloquially known as the tree of knowledge. If you want to get down and dirty, things can be "known" in the biblical sense, i.e. sex. So this tree is perhaps symbolic of becoming of age and having the ability, should one so choose, to have sex and possibly reproduce. If they were truly threatening the bees and their livelihood by eating the "apple," then they wouldn't have been able to eat anything while in the garden.

    If you anthropormorphize God, he didn't want his creations (kids) growing up, but realized he had to let them go when he did - this paradise you describe, where all their needs were taken care of, is akin to a child being born and growing up. A good childhood involves being dependent on one (or two) more responsible and capable than you are, who ultimately works in your best interests to ensure you're well adjusted when you leave.

    Knowing what lay outside of the garden, God didn't want Adam and Eve to leave because they'd be out of his direct influence. However, he already knew they'd disobey and need to go anyway.
     
  5. "Get smart and I'll fuck you over -- sayeth The Lord"
    -- Frank Zappa
     
  6. Ok how about this:
    First, I have to say that I am not a Christian. Having said that, let's consider the story from a modern scientific bent. What if the forbidden fruit was actually MEAT!
    You see, before we started to eat meat we were, (according to evolution) just apes that had learned to walk upright. We were only eating fruits and veggies, and so forth.
    We were innocent and ignorant, and ignorance is bliss. Life was Eden.
    Then we started to eat meat, which gave us different kinds of protein and made our brains grow. We got smarter, began to think in the abstract, and began to question life and everything in it.
    Once we started to question, we lost our innocence, and our bliss, therefore losing the state of Eden.
     

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