Here’s how fucked up the story of Adam & Eve is, even before the incest.
Imagine you were literally just created a short time ago - a season, a year, whatever - and you live in a literally perfect realm, and have no concept of deceit. Then a snake has a conversation with you. Sure, why not? God created everything - he directly told you so. So when the snake says “it’s all good, eat away,” you don’t even have a concept for doubting that he’s legit and honest. So you eat the fruit and suddenly, BAM, God shows up all pissed off. He punishes you for not understanding that he didn’t actually send a messenger. With banishment, pain, and death.
This is the equivalent of your 3 year old knocking over their bowl of Cheerios after you told them not to and so you drive them out to the woods and leave them there.
“I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story,” said Ford.
“Eh?”
“Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?”
“Yes of course I do.”
“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting ‘Gotcha’. It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.”
Don’t forget that god is supposedly all knowing and all seeing. So he knew his was going to happen anyway, watched it happen, and then swooped in to punish them knowing full well it was his fault and could have intervened at any point.
Unless of course, Satan is more powerful than god?
The incest issue is actually an artifact of the religion initially not being monotheistic. Each region had their own religion and they were all treated as equally valid (at least by early Jewdaism), so the creation story was basically “God created a paradise (and everything else) and two people in that paradise, but then they got kicked out and had to go live with all the other people made by all the other gods”. Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel, Cain killed Abel, so it was pretty much just Cain that carried on that legacy.
Then, eventually they went monotheistic but didn’t/couldn’t resolve the issues that introduced with the earlier stories (Noah’s story also has similar issues, though I’m not sure it also once had a resolution of “other gods made more people” or if the resolution involved smacking anyone who brought up the question).
The solution to naoh’s story is also semi “incest” btw. I recently wondered the same a quick google told me naoh was on the arc with the wives of his sons. Not his sons, their wives. They repopulated the world…
None of it’s that fucked up if you interpret it as a creation story that’s about why things are the way they are rather than something that literally happened.
Creation stories do tend to involve incest because there weren’t many folks around. And you’re not meant to worry about understanding of deceit because it’s explaining why life isn’t perfect and served that function perfectly well.
Of course, this still presents a problem for literal believers. But they’re a minority (and have been for hundreds of years).
How does it show that when it’s describing events that didn’t happen?
If the events never happened, the point of the story is to derive some other kind of truth or message, which means the story needs to be interpreted to derive that message. If you interpret it the way it was intended, you get a message about the world being imperfect, even though you might believe in a benevolent God. If you interpret it in a different way, you’ll get a different message.
You should think about the biblical creation myth the same way you would think about any other ancient mythology. We’re not going around making fun of the ancient Greeks and their mythology because Zeus was a ho and the stories don’t make any sense through modern eyes: we generally take them as they are, and use them to understand how the ancients understood the world they were in.
Here’s how fucked up the story of Adam & Eve is, even before the incest.
Imagine you were literally just created a short time ago - a season, a year, whatever - and you live in a literally perfect realm, and have no concept of deceit. Then a snake has a conversation with you. Sure, why not? God created everything - he directly told you so. So when the snake says “it’s all good, eat away,” you don’t even have a concept for doubting that he’s legit and honest. So you eat the fruit and suddenly, BAM, God shows up all pissed off. He punishes you for not understanding that he didn’t actually send a messenger. With banishment, pain, and death.
This is the equivalent of your 3 year old knocking over their bowl of Cheerios after you told them not to and so you drive them out to the woods and leave them there.
I always upvote The Guide references
Don’t forget that god is supposedly all knowing and all seeing. So he knew his was going to happen anyway, watched it happen, and then swooped in to punish them knowing full well it was his fault and could have intervened at any point.
Unless of course, Satan is more powerful than god?
It’s almost as though iron age peasant allegories for natural phenomena don’t make any kind of fucking sense
I laughed so hard at this. Always love getting another take on the absurdity of treating the Bible as immutable knowledge.
“problem of evil”
a classic
To the final point, I think it’s be more accurate to say deception is more powerful than security, or entropy is more powerful than order.
It kinda goes both ways. Chaos forbids its own absolution. It’d be too well ordered.
Balance is the most powerful, the true chaos. Hypocrisy reigns.
Thank you for attending my toker talk.
The incest issue is actually an artifact of the religion initially not being monotheistic. Each region had their own religion and they were all treated as equally valid (at least by early Jewdaism), so the creation story was basically “God created a paradise (and everything else) and two people in that paradise, but then they got kicked out and had to go live with all the other people made by all the other gods”. Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel, Cain killed Abel, so it was pretty much just Cain that carried on that legacy.
Then, eventually they went monotheistic but didn’t/couldn’t resolve the issues that introduced with the earlier stories (Noah’s story also has similar issues, though I’m not sure it also once had a resolution of “other gods made more people” or if the resolution involved smacking anyone who brought up the question).
The solution to naoh’s story is also semi “incest” btw. I recently wondered the same a quick google told me naoh was on the arc with the wives of his sons. Not his sons, their wives. They repopulated the world…
This. Iirc, after the murder incident, Cain goes abroad and marries a woman from a different land (?)
Alternatively her kidnaps his sister, or marries Lilith
Only if you left their bowl balanced on the tip of a pencil to begin with.
Whole thing was a setup.
It’s the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. How are you supposed to know the Lord is good if you don’t know what good is?
None of it’s that fucked up if you interpret it as a creation story that’s about why things are the way they are rather than something that literally happened.
Creation stories do tend to involve incest because there weren’t many folks around. And you’re not meant to worry about understanding of deceit because it’s explaining why life isn’t perfect and served that function perfectly well.
Of course, this still presents a problem for literal believers. But they’re a minority (and have been for hundreds of years).
It shows a being that believers say is the ultimate moral authority, God, behaving in a morally abhorrent way.
How does it show that when it’s describing events that didn’t happen?
If the events never happened, the point of the story is to derive some other kind of truth or message, which means the story needs to be interpreted to derive that message. If you interpret it the way it was intended, you get a message about the world being imperfect, even though you might believe in a benevolent God. If you interpret it in a different way, you’ll get a different message.
You should think about the biblical creation myth the same way you would think about any other ancient mythology. We’re not going around making fun of the ancient Greeks and their mythology because Zeus was a ho and the stories don’t make any sense through modern eyes: we generally take them as they are, and use them to understand how the ancients understood the world they were in.
The biblical literalists are literally running a huge chunk of our country (USA) right now. American evangelicals are fucking deranged.
I can agree with you there. There’s no hate like Christian “love”.