Diary: WHAT THE BIBLE TELLS ME: ADAM WAS A SLACKER, EVE GOT A BUM RAP AND DARWIN WAS RIGHT

In a memorable episode of the 1990s television series "Northern Exposure" an Indian shaman played by Canadian actor Graham Greene went through the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, asking the white residents for examples of stories their culture used to explain their existence and function in the universe and of their understanding of those stories.

All primitive societies created stories called myths, allegories, parables, fables, legends, folklore or meme to keep and pass along knowledge and understandings because they had no printing presses to record their knowledge or remembrances and no libraries or computer files to store and preserve what they might have recorded if they could have recorded it. They used fictional stories to do that. These tales would exist in vocal form for eons, which made them subject to some drifting of details, before man was able to write them down. Their gods were central to all that transpired and animals were often supporting characters.

But, of the residents of Cicely, only the Indians knew about the stories all early societies created. Those born and raised in the Judeo-Christian heritage hadn't the faintest idea what the Indian shaman was seeking. The closest any non-Indian could come was trying to recall an event that happened to a relative.

What the shaman was seeking were examples of the modern terminology "meme," a term coined in 1976 by zoologist and evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins. He said the meme is "a unit of culture information transferrable from one human mind to another." Biblical stories are memes, or were memes before religion destroyed them by distorting the information they were created to convey.

Such a destruction happened to the story of our ancestors, Adam and Eve.

Accepted understanding of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis is that God placed his newest creations in a lush garden in the heart of the modern-day Mideast, where he expected them to live forever in a state of purity, bliss and innocence. But the woman, Eve, was misled by a vocal serpent that talked her into doing what God had forbid humans to do. The accepted view is that Eve led a defiance of God's wishes with rebellion, created original sin, and unleashed evil causing mankind to lose the paradise God intended man to have forever. And she used her feminine attributes to entice a gullible Adam to follow her. That isn't true.

If we take all traces of the supernatural out of the equation for a short time, we can see that the story tells us that the human diet consisted of fruit from trees, which indicates early man was a tree-dwelling primate, just as science has been telling us for years. Adam and Eve were both naked, but it didn't matter, because they didn't know anything about what we consider today to be civilized human behavior, and that is telling us that they weren't moral beings.. Their behavior didn't differ from behavior of any other animal on earth, and that tells us that they were basically animals, just as science has been telling us since Charles Darwin stated so.

By partaking of only fruit from The Tree of knowledge of good and bad, Adam's eyes were opened, a metaphor for the advent of understanding and self-awareness not present in his previous condition. The "herb of the field" God now allows Adam to eat signifies primitive man leaving life as a tree-dwelling primate to become an earth-bound creature preceding the move into civilization. After eviction from Eden, God instructs Adam that he must till the earth, which signifies the advent of agriculture, that science has been telling us was man's earliest profession as a civilized being.

Eden was not a small plot of land in the Mideast. It was the entire earth in which palm trees sprouted along the Arctic and Antarctic Circles; the Great Sahara Forest thrived with lakes and streams and wildlife frolicked among the trees and in the grasslands and meadows as they may have done on the lands of what is now Mideastern desert. There has to be a reason the Mideast is rich with oil, that is commonly thought to be a derivative of the remains of organic matter which would include vegetation and animal life of all sizes. Some people think dinosaurs that died millions of years ago and were covered by the ever-changing surface of the earth are the source. Whether huge populations of dinosaurs or other smaller animals or just plant matter, the process required massive amount of vegetation for survival and that vegetation had to cover the Mideast to support the numbers. The deserts we have today throughout the Mideast could be the result of mankind's misusing the land and turning once-verdant landscapes into sandy tracts of wasteland. That is the real loss of our Edenic paradise, and Eve didn't do it. (Be noted that in ancient times, heating of the atmosphere to allow palm tree in what are now ice-covered tracts occurred over vast periods of time allowing animals and vegetation adequate time to adapt or evolve to thrive in warmer climates. Present-day global warming that alarms most scientists is occurring rapidly, doing in a century what took millions of years on precivilization earth.)

The Bible puts Eden along the Euphrates River, whose existence is unquestioned, but it also has three other rivers near that location. Those rivers don't exist and their nonexistence should be a clue that the story of Eden and of Adam and Eve wasn't of an historical place or real figures but rather was created to reveal important knowledge. The placement of Eden along the Euphrates is because civilization cropped up at that very location, as scientific knowledge tells us.

Western religions maintain that God is incapable of lying; but Genesis 2:17 says God told Adam that if he partook of The Tree's fruit he would die on the "very day" he ate. But after eating, Adam left Eden, fathered a son, Cain, then another son, Abel, who grew into adults to be a farmer and a shepherd before Cain whacked Abel in a fit of jealousy. Adam fathered another son, Seth, and lived to the age of 930, so it's clear Adam didn't die on the very day he ate. So did God lie to Adam or does the statement mean something entirely different from what religion claims? It should be obvious that the meaning differs from mainstream religion's view.

God didn't threaten Adam with death for partaking of The Tree, only told him he would know about his own mortality, something animals apparently don't understand. God was telling Adam that once he ate of The Tree he would know things he didn't know before eating and was warning him that once knowing, he couldn't go back to an animal existence. He would be leaving his carefree and obligationless existence as an animal and entering a life as a human being fraught with obligation, duty, toil, concern, and worry in addition to morality, and will have the ability to feel remorse and regret.

What does it mean to be created in "our image, after our likeness" "Our" indicates that God was including in creation more than himself. Does in mean that God and the angels, who were already in existence, had two legs, two arms and one head? Not likely since God is everywhere at all times and a human-like body would be problematic. Does it mean that man being the only animal with creative abilities reflects God who is the creator of all things. Not likely because he said "our image" and "our likeness." God and his angels possessed a moral code of knowing good and bad so "our image" can only mean that mankind would be the only earthly creation that would hold a moral code, the only one that would be able to distinguish what behavior is good and what is bad. The very tree in the middle of Eden Adam was alerted about contained that knowledge. So it appears that Adam wasn't forbidden to eat of The Tree, only that he was warned that he would know good and bad (morality) and once he knew that, he couldn't regain his animal existence and go back to an uncivilized earth (Eden). Knowing good and evil is what the serpent told Eve she would do, and it added that knowing good and evil would make her "like the gods" (i.e. God and the angels), just as God meant with "our likeness". That is what "in our image, after our likeness" truly means.

The knowledge of good and bad (a moral philosophy) requires that mankind determine what is acceptable and unacceptable and not to claim that God's will determines all behavior. God being the source of all knowledge about good and bad that he shares with his angels would be the image passed on to the human creation and would indicate that God intended Adam and Eve to sample the fruits borne of The Tree of knowledge of good and bad. He intended them to be civilized, not to remain in Eden forever as animalistic creatures no different from any other animal populating the earth. And he put The Tree in the middle of Eden knowing they would partake of it. That was his plan

That is the real meaning of the Eden story.

Eve's assertiveness in leading mankind into a civilized condition reflects modern male-female relationships, also known as the battle between the sexes. Men often let matters slide while women take the lead, especially when it comes to family duties around the house (called nagging by modern-day Adam slackers) and cultural affairs such as whether to attend the opera or ballet instead of watching football on television. In defense of the male; slacking and resistence are in our genes, inhereted from the first Adam.

Because the story of Eden has been distorted by religion, females in the three religions descending from Adam and Eve ~ Judaism, Christianity and Islam ~ have been oppressed, repressed, degraded and basically used as property and chattel without rights of any sort. They have been robbed of their dignity and forced to submit to male domination and control. They have been second-class citizens in their own societies. They have been used as unwilling brides to unite kingdoms politically when men weren't able to make peace on their own. Domestic violence may also stem from the lies told about Eve. The problem is less severe in the oldest religion, Judaism ~ perhaps because the Jews have had enough time to socially evolve into a more-civilized society ~ while oppression has been most severe in the newest faction, Islam. And that oppression isn't likely to abate until all religions come to a clear-and-truthful understanding of the Adam-and-Eve story with its original meaning, before religion damaged it.

Eve does not deserve the treatment she has received since mankind left Eden. She did not defy God or lead a rebellion against Him'her-it; she did not commit original sin; she did not lose paradise and she did not introduce deception or other evil into the human existence. She enticed her reluctant slacker of a man to follow her lead and emerge from an animal existence to take on the trappings of a civilized human being capable of living in harmony and obeying moral codes, as it appears God always intended. The little lady did good.

Only 40 percent of Americans accept evolution as fact. The rest think God created mankind with only the power of his spiritual mind. But the true adventures of Adam and Eve tell us that mankind did indeed evolve from a beast-like tree-dwelling creature ~ as God intended ~ into the human form of today, just as science has been telling us for decades.

Recently departed conservative Rev. Jerry Falwell has been quoted as saying, "The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc."

Another conservative religious figure, Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, opined that, "Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it...Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory."

At the May Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif., three 2008 GOP hopefuls ~ Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado ~ indicated they did not believe in evolution. Polls have shown that 65% of white evangelical Christians reject evolution.

Those views are problematic because the Bible ~ the "inerrant ... word of God" ~ says Darwin was correct about evolution. The stances voiced by these religious and political figures and their followers indicate they do not understand evolution and know nothing of what Bible stories are telling us, and to reject evolution is to reject an important part of the Bible.

Here is a national problem: those who claim the Bible must be read literally because it is God's inerrant word, but can't understand the allegorical nature of the Adam-and-Eve story have been rejoicing in the war against Iraq and are calling for more war ~ specifically against Iran ~ because they think that such wars in the Mideast are a prelude to the Apocalypse and their ascent into a new paradise through a Rapture. They are wrong, and are the embodiment of the false prophets the Bible warns against. They are followers of an Antichrist (not a real person but a distorted version of the true Christ) because the Apocalypse and battle at Armageddon are just as allegorical as the Adam and Eve narrative. These people are dangerous.

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