Based Camp - The Adam & Eve Story Does Not Say What You Remember

00:00:00.000 I had read this story as like a child.

00:00:02.720 I had, and I think this was pushed

00:00:04.800 by like Bible conspiracy theorists and stuff like that,

00:00:07.620 that we didn't know where the Garden of Eden was.

00:00:10.540 It like gives an exact location for the Garden of Eden.

00:00:13.640 But then the two other things that really like

00:00:15.280 just chilled me when I was rereading it

00:00:17.020 is why wouldn't God want man

00:00:20.260 to have the knowledge of good and evil?

00:00:22.420 If it was evil to be nude,

00:00:26.060 then God would not have let them walk around the garden nude.

00:00:29.240 Is being nude really evil?

00:00:32.260 No, it's not really evil.

00:00:34.140 It is a social construct

00:00:36.120 that man tells other man about what is evil.

00:00:41.800 Knowledge of good and evil is not knowledge

00:00:44.220 like a perfect knowledge of what's right and what's wrong

00:00:47.120 because that's obviously something man does not have.

00:00:49.700 Instead, knowledge of good and evil in this context

00:00:53.140 means man's ability to make decisions

00:00:56.400 about what is good and evil.

00:00:58.620 So in eating from that tree,

00:01:01.680 man took unto himself

00:01:03.460 through making a decision for himself

00:01:06.300 about what was good and what was evil.

00:01:09.800 The tree did not need to be magic

00:01:12.620 to impart the knowledge of good and evil unto man.

00:01:16.080 It was him making a decision independent from God.

00:01:20.680 So when I reread this,

00:01:22.620 one of the curses that I could have sworn

00:01:25.240 was put on man.

00:01:26.200 And there is a reading of this,

00:01:28.180 that this is one of the curses that was put on man,

00:01:29.980 was to die.

00:01:31.660 That before this man would have lived forever 0.52

00:01:33.600 and not being allowed to eat from the apple

00:01:36.980 that makes you live forever

00:01:37.740 is not one of the punishments.

00:01:39.300 It is a consequence.

00:01:40.600 Would you like to know more?

00:01:41.660 Well, I am so excited to be here with you today, Simone.

00:01:45.740 Like what?

00:01:47.060 You had done this thing recently where you're like,

00:01:48.720 I'm going to go back through the Bible 1.00

00:01:50.520 and reread it with this new context I have

00:01:53.620 while also recognizing that when we've gone back

00:01:56.020 and read scripture recently,

00:01:56.940 it doesn't say what we remembered it having said.

00:01:59.640 Right.

00:02:00.600 Like what I read growing up.

00:02:01.820 It's almost like a Mandela effect thing.

00:02:03.620 Like I am certain that the,

00:02:06.380 for example,

00:02:07.520 the story that we're going to go over today,

00:02:09.360 the story of Adam and Eve,

00:02:11.500 I am certain I remember it saying

00:02:13.900 that Adam didn't have to work in Eden.

00:02:17.760 And yet it very explicitly says Adam had to work in Eden.

00:02:21.460 Yeah.

00:02:21.760 And his job was tilling the land.

00:02:23.900 I remember God breathing the life into Adam's mouth,

00:02:28.840 but he breathed it into Adam's nose.

00:02:31.860 I, there are so many aspects of this story

00:02:35.000 where I was like, what is going on?

00:02:36.520 God doesn't do CPR right.

00:02:38.200 Oh my goodness.

00:02:39.800 Well, no, speaking of CPR,

00:02:41.580 another thing I was amazed about

00:02:43.200 was how similar the removing of the rib

00:02:46.660 felt to modern surgery.

00:02:49.680 So he sedated him.

00:02:52.060 Yeah.

00:02:52.280 So he put him into a deep sleep.

00:02:54.640 Yeah.

00:02:55.140 Then he cuts him open.

00:02:57.320 He removes the rib.

00:02:58.940 He takes out the rib.

00:03:00.080 Then he reseals the area that he cut with flesh.

00:03:03.680 Yeah.

00:03:04.120 That was so weird.

00:03:05.480 And I, and I read that.

00:03:06.620 I was like, I remember like something more animalistic,

00:03:09.000 like pulling it out or something like that.

00:03:11.020 Yeah.

00:03:11.480 Just, you know, you know, like whatever.

00:03:14.500 Yeah.

00:03:14.840 Not okay.

00:03:15.380 We put him under sedation.

00:03:16.800 We remove the rib.

00:03:18.020 We, so there were, but, but actually it's not just that.

00:03:21.620 The larger themes weren't the themes I remembered.

00:03:24.440 And this is something that we get into in the next,

00:03:28.560 in the upcoming track that we're doing this,

00:03:30.920 this Friday where you wanted to dig deep into the subject on the track.

00:03:34.020 And I was just, I just haven't read it in a while.

00:03:35.340 So I need to go back to it,

00:03:36.400 which is what's really going on with this story.

00:03:39.300 Because basically the gist of the story is,

00:03:41.380 I remember it is Adam is in Eden with,

00:03:45.140 with Eve and Adam doesn't have to work or anything like that.

00:03:48.980 And a snake comes to Eve and Adam and tells them you should really eat this

00:03:54.880 apple of knowledge that you've been told not to eat.

00:03:57.540 And then Adam goes and he eats the apple of knowledge and God is mad about that.

00:04:03.200 And then God kicks them out and curses, you know,

00:04:07.480 women to have pain and childbirth and men to have to work all of their lives for, for food.

00:04:13.800 That was a gist of the story I remembered.

00:04:15.960 That was not the story that I read for a number of reasons that I'd love to go deep,

00:04:21.980 but I'm happy to have you, you take a shot at this first, Simone.

00:04:24.340 What really surprised you in your interpretation of it when you reread it?

00:04:27.640 I was, I was definitely surprised by a lot of the things you were.

00:04:30.780 I just thought that they walked around this perfectly

00:04:32.520 maintained garden and just picked fruit off the trees and kind of enjoyed that.

00:04:37.380 So that was surprising to me.

00:04:38.620 And I was also surprised by God's warning as to why one should not eat from the tree of the knowledge

00:04:47.000 of good and evil in that, like he says, if you do it, you'll die.

00:04:51.100 Whereas before I thought it was just like, no, no, no, don't do that.

00:04:54.100 So that was interesting to me.

00:04:55.700 I was also surprised that there are kind of two big deal trees, right?

00:04:59.720 There's the tree of life and there's the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

00:05:02.780 And no one, no one really talks about the other tree.

00:05:06.040 And there's another thing.

00:05:07.080 So I had vaguely remembered the tree of life, but I had understood that the way it worked

00:05:12.320 is that the tree of life kept a man alive forever.

00:05:14.680 So long as he lived in the garden and was eating for the tree of life.

00:05:17.960 It's implied in the story that that is not true.

00:05:20.480 And that is not how the tree of life worked.

00:05:22.520 If man ever once ate from the tree of life, he would live forever.

00:05:26.560 So man never ate from the tree of life.

00:05:29.100 He never touched the tree of life, which also to me kind of implies,

00:05:32.780 why is this being kicked out of Eden happened almost immediately within the context of the

00:05:36.680 story and that he had never eaten from that other tree either, that he wasn't banned from

00:05:40.800 eating from.

00:05:41.660 Well, yeah, I mean, at the end, it's kind of implied that God is worried about him now

00:05:45.940 eating from the tree of life because then he could live forever.

00:05:48.960 No, but yeah, change the...

00:05:50.160 Okay, so I'll go into the larger context of the story here as I re-understand it.

00:05:53.880 So first, I want to give some quotes here that people might be surprised about.

00:05:56.420 The, what man had to work in the garden of Eden?

00:05:58.640 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of

00:06:04.420 it, to work it.

00:06:05.340 He even uses the word work.

00:06:07.360 Very explicitly, he was tending this garden and it wasn't a garden that grew automatically.

00:06:11.940 Another thing that was really interesting is it pointed out that plants, even magical

00:06:16.660 plants in the garden of Eden cannot grow without water.

00:06:19.060 And because it did not rain in those days, God had the water spring up from under the

00:06:24.200 ground and then secede a number of times, like a global flood almost, but like a small

00:06:29.380 watering level before man was brought into this garden to get it ready for man.

00:06:35.840 But then after that, man had to take care of it.

00:06:38.160 And it implied that at least part of taking care of it was the watering of it because this

00:06:42.320 water rising and automatically watering seems to have stopped when man came into the garden.

00:06:47.660 Oh, I didn't pick that up, but I mean, tending was definitely, is obvious.

00:06:53.000 He has a job.

00:06:54.620 Yeah.

00:06:55.180 So the other big thing, and this is one that you really picked up on and wanted to pontificate

00:06:59.200 on quite a bit, is man was not tempted by the serpent to eat from the tree of good

00:07:05.460 and evil.

00:07:06.200 And it was not a tree of knowledge.

00:07:07.680 It's very, every time it's talked about, it's the knowledge of good and evil.

00:07:11.220 It is a specific kind of knowledge.

00:07:12.740 And I will delineate further later in this.

00:07:14.840 It's not generic good and evil.

00:07:16.140 It's a specific kind of good and evil.

00:07:17.820 And this is something I didn't pick up on the first time I read it.

00:07:20.180 But anyway, so how did the serpent trick go through this part of the story?

00:07:28.180 Right.

00:07:28.680 So the serpent, nah, God, well, he approaches Eve and to her specifically says, oh, you know

00:07:34.880 that tree, you should try it.

00:07:35.960 And she says, well, no, God said not to. 1.00

00:07:38.260 And the snake's, nah, God's full of shit. 1.00

00:07:40.780 By the way, God made this snake as well. 1.00

00:07:42.480 He first made all the animals in the Garden of Eden, and I had forgotten this, to help

00:07:46.520 out Adam, because God thought it was kind of mean to have Adam do all this work by himself.

00:07:50.540 But none of them turned out to be really good helpers.

00:07:52.780 So that's when he decided to make Eve.

00:07:54.540 Oh, I read that part as meaning something a little bit more salacious than that.

00:07:59.260 Oh.

00:07:59.420 So God put all of them.

00:08:01.100 You thought this was about them knowing each other.

00:08:02.720 Well, yeah.

00:08:03.620 So God put all the animals in front of man, and he had them name them, and then none of

00:08:07.820 them was a suitable companion for man.

00:08:10.340 Well, what does that mean, suitable companion, if a suitable companion is a woman? 0.99

00:08:14.340 Well, no, but God said that he shouldn't toil alone.

00:08:18.340 But for the man, there was not found a helper as his partner.

00:08:22.940 A helper.

00:08:24.180 And remember, God, so at 2.18, then the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be

00:08:30.020 alone.

00:08:30.500 I will make him a helper as his partner.

00:08:32.500 I mean, this guy's working.

00:08:35.080 He's trying to get him a helpful worker and, you know, danger noodles.

00:08:39.060 I'll tell you what, oxen are definitely more helpful than women plowing a field. 1.00

00:08:43.140 Right.

00:08:43.500 But we don't know if he's plowing.

00:08:45.340 He is tilling.

00:08:48.040 Okay.

00:08:48.840 I mean, you could do it.

00:08:50.020 Okay, but let's...

00:08:51.400 I mean, but the quote's so funny.

00:08:54.180 It is really funny that after God finds Adam and Eve, and he gets mad at Eve after asking

00:09:00.020 what they've done, he says to the man, because you've listened to the voice of your wife and

00:09:04.880 you've eaten of the tree of which I command you, blah, blah, blah. 0.93

00:09:07.800 He then curses him.

00:09:09.080 But that was Adam's problem was listening to his wife.

00:09:12.040 And I think that's so funny.

00:09:13.300 Like Eve, she succumbed to social pressure.

00:09:16.360 It's the snake's fault.

00:09:18.200 But Adam...

00:09:20.360 Adam...

00:09:20.960 Because you've listened to your wife.

00:09:22.680 Yeah, you should have known better.

00:09:24.380 Oh, well, Adam.

00:09:24.520 But I actually read this differently in context, and I'll explain what I think the actual correct

00:09:28.900 reading of this is in just a second.

00:09:30.400 So before I go further with this story, something I really want to talk about that was quite

00:09:36.040 transformative for me is I am reading this story idly, right?

00:09:41.000 I'm like, okay, I'm reading it.

00:09:42.480 I'm trying to learn from it.

00:09:43.580 And I can come up with hypotheses about what I think that this is supposed to be telling us.

00:09:48.360 As I believe, God always tried to reveal as true a truth as he could to man when he was

00:09:53.680 giving man true revelations, and it wasn't just, you know, pagan nonsense.

00:09:57.120 And so this, I think, was one of the true revelations.

00:09:59.940 And if it is one of the true revelations, then it should have contained as true a story

00:10:04.000 as he could convey to early man telling them some story.

00:10:07.720 So the story that it seemed to me like he was telling was the story of man building civilization

00:10:15.120 of the first cities, of the development of human sentience and culture.

00:10:23.220 And so I read the story, and something that just like immediately jumped out at me that

00:10:27.500 was really weird is every time I had read this story as like a child, I had, and I think

00:10:34.200 this was pushed by like Bible conspiracy theorists and stuff like that, that we didn't know where

00:10:39.220 the Garden of Eden was. Like the Garden of Eden was at some magical place, and some people

00:10:46.900 hypothesized it's in Africa, and Joseph Smith hypothesized it's in America. And so like I,

00:10:53.100 and I read it, and it like gives an exact location for the Garden of Eden. And that shocked me to my

00:10:59.220 core, kind of. I was like, what?

00:11:00.180 Because it starts with that. The Garden of, before Adam even shows up, they're like really specific

00:11:04.760 about where it is. Yeah, so I should be clear what it says. It says the Garden of Eden

00:11:09.140 is at the headwaters of four rivers. Two of the rivers don't correlate with rivers that we know

00:11:15.800 about today. So they could have been streams, or their names could have been changed.

00:11:19.220 Maybe they dried up. I mean, you know, geology happens.

00:11:21.400 Whatever. But two of the rivers, we definitely know what rivers they are. It's the Tigris and

00:11:25.880 the Euphrates River. Well, we know where the Tigris and Euphrates River's headwaters are. Like,

00:11:30.180 it's not a vague thing. The headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates River, well, I have to pull

00:11:34.880 up the name of that, is the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey. Okay? And I'll put this on a map

00:11:41.080 on the screen. Now, something really interesting happened. I was like, okay, if I am accurate,

00:11:45.260 if this is a story about the development of the first human cities, and the development of Bronze

00:11:50.580 Age man, then I should look up, you know, this transition of man from being like an animal to being

00:11:54.980 like a human as we think of him today, I should look up, what's the oldest city that we know of today?

00:12:00.180 Hmm. And shockingly, and this is one of those moments that I keep having when I'm looking at

00:12:05.020 Bible stuff, and I'm like, what? Shockingly, it's a less than two-hour drive from the Taurus

00:12:13.000 Mountains. Sorry, I made a mistake here. It is actually in the Taurus Mountains. It is not a

00:12:17.560 two-hour drive from the Taurus Mountains. I was looking at where Google had put the pin for the

00:12:21.600 Taurus Mountains on Google Earth, not taking into account that the Taurus Mountains aren't an exact

00:12:26.260 point on the map. So it was exactly right as to where the first city was.

00:12:31.580 Pretty wild.

00:12:32.160 This is accurately recalled. Now, keep in mind, this settlement was settled around 10,000 years ago.

00:12:38.740 The oldest that we think that the story of Adam and Eve is is maybe 5,000 years old.

00:12:43.860 Or 6,000 was what I was getting when I looked this up, yeah.

00:12:46.400 Yeah. So they were remembering something about as far in their past as the writing of the story of

00:12:55.560 Adam and Eve is from our past, and a pretty exact location. Now, keep in mind, this was likely written

00:13:02.240 by people in what is today Israel, or maybe Egypt, or maybe, maybe in Mesopotamia. But all of those

00:13:10.340 areas are pretty far away from this location. The other thing that's really interesting is it said that

00:13:15.360 when man left the garden, he left to the east. That was the direction that civilization spread from

00:13:21.600 there. Now, if you know your Bronze Age history, you know that this is where civilization spread

00:13:27.780 from this founding location, that most of the early civilizations were in the east.

00:13:33.060 Well, well, well.

00:13:34.180 Then it has something that sounds like a very bizarre contradiction. At the beginning of the story,

00:13:40.580 it said that God made the Garden of Eden in the east. Well, if God made the Garden of Eden in the

00:13:48.700 east and man left from it in the east, that makes no sense from the context of the original storytellers.

00:13:55.440 That would have sounded like an anachronism. And yet, from the perspective of most of the Judeo-Christian 0.60

00:14:01.780 followers today, the garden is in the east. In fact, there are very, very few Judeo-Christian

00:14:09.080 followers to the east of this area in Turkey.

00:14:13.520 A.k.a. Turkey-yay.

00:14:15.500 Turkey-yay now, yeah. So he, they changed their name for people who are wondering what she's talking

00:14:19.660 about there. That was really, like, chilling to me. And I think it shows this hypothesis of what

00:14:24.280 I'm talking about, of God trying to explain man's early history. But then the two other things that

00:14:28.260 really, like, just chilled me when I was rereading it is I had thought that man had eaten an apple of

00:14:33.700 knowledge. Or at least an apple of, like, knowledge of good and evil. And that always

00:14:39.720 really confused me. Why wouldn't God want man to have the knowledge of good and evil? That doesn't

00:14:47.600 seem to make sense, right? I was like, I must be misinterpreting the story because I can't imagine

00:14:52.300 God doing that. And if you read the story like a child, it appears that that's what's happened.

00:14:57.760 But if you read it like an adult, you recognize something. What does man do the moment he eats the

00:15:04.060 apple? He is ashamed by his nudity, and so is the woman. And so they hide from God with fig leaves, 0.99

00:15:13.080 and then they want to wear clothes. Well, this is really interesting. Nudity. So it's said that this

00:15:19.160 this knowledge of good and evil, of the type the tree provided, God had. If it was evil to be nude,

00:15:26.020 then God would not have let them walk around the garden nude. One would hope. If it was truly evil.

00:15:32.080 Well, not one would hope, but it's said that God has this true knowledge of good and evil as well.

00:15:35.760 God has a lot of weird things. He also has additional knowledge to this, that this is not real evil.

00:15:41.920 Is being nude really evil? No, it's not really evil. It is a social construct

00:15:48.600 that man tells other man about what is evil. It is an evolved idea around what is evil,

00:15:58.000 around social norms and everything like that. Yeah, this is like something we actively need

00:16:02.660 to tell our kids. No, when we go outside, you do have to wear pants. And I remember my parents

00:16:08.180 telling me that because that was kind of weird. But this is critical, right? Because it now makes

00:16:14.580 some other things make sense. We know that women in our society are much more prone to following

00:16:18.680 social consensus than men are and are much more prone to generating these types of social norms.

00:16:22.740 As is the case with Mr. Danger Noodle telling her what to do.

00:16:26.380 Exactly, right? So we learn that you need to guard against this sort of social pressure that can come

00:16:32.200 from your wives and from women in society. In a big way in society right now, I think that this is

00:16:37.300 potentially one of the problems we're having is that the gender that is more susceptible to social 0.75

00:16:42.200 conformity has equal power. And I do want women to have equal power in society, but there are negative

00:16:47.780 consequences towards this social conformity, and it can lead to virtue spirals and stuff like that.

00:16:52.360 But let's talk about specifically the kind of evil that man engaged in, because this is so interesting.

00:16:57.500 The evil that he engaged in is a type of evil that is disproportionately engaged in within religious 1.00

00:17:05.600 communities. It is following man's social norms, okay, above God's effort in the word of God.

00:17:17.420 That is the type of evil that man ate here. And it works perfectly for the theming of the story.

00:17:24.820 If the theming of the story is about man first creating settlements, like small settlements that he was

00:17:31.320 living in, and then expanding out and creating the first civilization, the first cities, when man was

00:17:37.160 living in the woods, he didn't have this form of evil, right? He didn't have this form of good and evil

00:17:42.160 because he was just living in small trial structures, right? Like they might've had some rules, but they

00:17:46.500 were much less developed than what began to evolve in cities. The good and evil of cities is the

00:17:55.660 condemnation of walking around nude because it has negative social consequences. And I think that

00:18:01.460 this has a bigger lesson to take away from it. And it's a very important lesson to me, which is

00:18:07.260 what society says is good is what is pro-social. What society says is evil is what is anti-social.

00:18:15.500 Society tells us these things because those are the ideas that promote the best interest of a general

00:18:23.060 hedonist living in society, right? If you were trying to promote aggregate hedonism within society,

00:18:28.420 which is really just the maximization of the environmental stimuli that caused your ancestors

00:18:35.240 to have the most surviving offspring. It is a saying of triviality. Those rules of good and evil that we

00:18:40.520 live by in our society, that is original sin. General utilitarianism is original sin. Banning pornography

00:18:48.920 is original sin. These are the things that are original sin, right? Not following directly what

00:18:56.060 is in the Bible and only what's in the Bible is original sin and only God's will that is revealed

00:19:02.140 through iterative revelation. And that was so transformative of me to get that understanding.

00:19:08.320 Yeah. No, that is so interesting because it's also not what anyone takes away from it. I've never heard

00:19:16.000 anyone have that interpretation before Malcolm, so I find this very entertaining.

00:19:19.740 Well, it also, you know, tells us a lot about starting civilization, right? Is that, well, actually

00:19:27.300 this comes to the next interpretation, which is important to understand starting civilization. So

00:19:30.580 God, the concept of original sin, like eating the apple being original sin, I don't really get that from

00:19:39.140 the piece. It doesn't really talk about sin anywhere. The snake tries to convince man to eat

00:19:46.020 the apple because it says that it will make man more like God. And man wants to eat the apple because

00:19:52.160 it will make man more like God. A lot of the sin in what is happening here is a quest for God's

00:19:58.780 knowledge. A quest for shortcuts to God is being condemned here.

00:20:03.380 Well, and that's actually something that really did surprise me from reading this again. I'm sorry to

00:20:07.220 interrupt, but like when I read 3 to 322, then the Lord God said, see, the man has become like one of

00:20:14.320 us, knowing good and evil. And now he might reach out his hand and take all stuff from the tree of

00:20:18.840 life and eat and live forever. And that's when he's, oh, we got to guard the tree of life. But he said,

00:20:23.000 so the man has become like one of us. That's really interesting. Like you say, it's more being on his

00:20:28.160 level in a weird way, I guess. So what does the story mean when it says the type of knowledge of good and

00:20:34.100 evil that man gained is the type that God had, and that man in a way became more like God when

00:20:40.200 getting this type of knowledge of good and evil? What it clearly means in context is not knowledge

00:20:46.240 of good and evil like a perfect knowledge of what's right and what's wrong, because that's obviously

00:20:50.880 something man does not have, nor was it something that he showed when he first like put on clothes to

00:20:57.900 hide his nakedness from God. Instead, knowledge of good and evil in this context means man's ability

00:21:05.640 to make decisions about what is good and evil in the same way that God makes decisions about what

00:21:12.780 is good and evil. Without this knowledge or ability, what man thinks is good and evil or what man knows

00:21:20.560 is good and evil is just what God lays out as good and evil. Knowledge of good and evil in this context

00:21:26.440 means knowledge of good and evil that contrasts or has the potential to conflict with God's knowledge

00:21:33.460 of good and evil. And what's really ironic and in a way beautiful in the way this story works,

00:21:39.700 it would mean that the tree of knowledge of good and evil didn't actually need to have any special or

00:21:45.840 magical properties to it to grant this ability to man. Because before he ate from that tree,

00:21:53.120 what was good and evil was simply the rules that God laid out. But the only rule that God had laid out

00:21:59.660 was to not eat from that tree. So in eating from that tree, man already took unto himself when he

00:22:07.740 reached and grabbed for that apple. That was when he was taking on to himself the knowledge of good and

00:22:14.380 evil. It wasn't biting the apple that gave him this ability. It was the fact that he thought he knew

00:22:21.720 better than God about what was good and what was evil in making the decision to eat from that tree.

00:22:27.960 And this reading's interpretation is actually made pretty clear by the text by a rather odd remark that

00:22:34.860 God makes that outside of this reading doesn't make a lot of sense. That if you touch the tree of the

00:22:41.920 knowledge of good and evil, that's what leads to the consequences. Not just eating from the tree.

00:22:47.800 This interpretation actually completely fixes the problem of an individual saying, well, then why

00:22:54.200 did God put this tree that gave man knowledge of good and evil, but then banned man from eating from

00:23:01.700 the tree, right? That seems like a very odd thing for God to do. There was never a tree of knowledge of

00:23:08.620 good and evil in the garden. It was just a regular tree. The important tree, the magic tree, was the tree

00:23:15.260 of life. He didn't ban man from eating the tree of life. He banned man from eating from the tree of the

00:23:20.940 knowledge of good and evil. And he named the tree that because he knew in eating from that tree, man

00:23:27.780 would take onto himself the responsibility of knowledge of good and evil. A incorrect responsibility

00:23:34.860 of knowledge of good and evil. There was never any deceit or trick on the behalf of God. God just knew

00:23:42.320 because he knows all things that will happen. You know, we believe in predestination that that was

00:23:47.480 the path that man would take. And that was the important role that that completely non-magical

00:23:53.600 and regular tree would have in the history of reality. Yeah. So, but the other interesting one

00:23:58.260 is the curses. So when I read this, one of the curses that I could have sworn was put on man. And there

00:24:05.920 is a reading of this, that this is one of the curses that was put on man was to die. That before this,

00:24:11.660 man would have lived forever. That isn't exactly one of the curses that's put on man.

00:24:16.320 Still that I take away from it. Hold on, hold on. I'll read the lines because it's, it's pretty

00:24:20.060 interesting, but there is a way of interpreting this that that was not one of the curses. That was a

00:24:26.360 consequence of eating from the tree of good and evil, but not one of the curses. So I will read the

00:24:33.120 quote here that really makes it sound like a consequence. And the Lord God said, the man has now

00:24:38.820 become like one of us knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and

00:24:43.620 take also from the tree of life and eat it and live forever. So Lord God banished him from the

00:24:49.080 garden of good and even to work from the ground, which had been taken. So if you see what's being

00:24:54.200 said there, the being driven from the garden of Eden is not one of the punishments and not being

00:24:59.400 allowed to eat from the apple that makes you live forever is not one of the punishments.

00:25:03.220 It is a consequence. It is somebody who has the knowledge of good and evil, cannot also live

00:25:09.420 forever. You can't have both of these things at once. It's unless you are God. Now take our

00:25:16.060 interpretation of how God works and how man works, right? Man is made God eventually millions of years

00:25:23.540 from now, a God that lives outside of time through this cycle of intergenerational improvement,

00:25:28.920 right? Through this cycle of one generation, martyring themselves for the next generation.

00:25:35.540 If man lived forever, he would not be able to improve fast enough or meaningfully enough to ever

00:25:41.440 become God. This is why ultimate life extension beyond just like health extension is sinful. It is

00:25:48.660 because it is to eat from the tree of everlasting life and stop this cycle of intergenerational

00:25:55.760 improvement. But it's another reading to this is that before man had the knowledge of good and evil,

00:26:04.440 before he had civilization, before he had what we would think of as cognizance or sentience,

00:26:07.940 he didn't really understand death. As I've pointed out, it wasn't exactly that man never died in the

00:26:13.300 garden. That's not exactly said. It's that death wasn't meaningful to him in the garden. He, like all

00:26:19.880 entities, pre-cognizance, pre-sentience, death isn't really important to them in the way it's important to us

00:26:25.600 because they have kids and they understand that their goal is to have kids. You know, a praying

00:26:29.160 mantis that has sex with another praying mantis and gets his head bitten off. To an animal, sacrificing 0.99

00:26:33.080 yourself for your children is often a natural thing to do. Or you don't even realize you're doing it.

00:26:38.380 It just happens. You're not worried about it. You don't even realize you're doing it because death

00:26:41.540 is not meaningful in that way. In a way, this knowledge of death and an elevation of death,

00:26:48.980 something of horror and something to be feared is part of the curse. When you have this sentience,

00:26:56.440 you also have death. If you are going to be a meaningful entity, God could not give us

00:27:01.760 the apple of everlasting life. And it's also important to note that this apple of everlasting

00:27:07.440 life is a metaphorical thing. We know that because he put an angel guarding it with a flaming sword,

00:27:12.760 and we know where this location broadly is. Humans have been pretty much everywhere in the world,

00:27:17.200 especially in Turkey. We would have run into an angel flipping about a flaming sword. So this

00:27:21.920 is either not a location there anymore, or this is a metaphorical location at this point. I do want

00:27:27.400 to read this, because this is the other part about God not exactly cursing man to die.

00:27:32.120 Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your

00:27:36.760 life. It will produce thorns and sisal for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat

00:27:43.240 of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken

00:27:48.360 for dust you are, and to dust you will return. So by this, this is more that you will have to work

00:27:55.400 to eat food until you die. Not you're going to die and you weren't going to die.

00:28:00.320 Well, and the work isn't going to be easy, because he worked before. He had a job before,

00:28:06.320 to the point where he needed a helper and companion. But apparently it wasn't hard,

00:28:11.020 and now it sucks because there's weeds, and they're spiky weeds.

00:28:14.580 Yeah, but they're particularly difficult. And this gets really interesting to me.

00:28:19.160 So in the following tract, we're going to be talking about something that humanity is facing

00:28:22.660 right now. We call the trial of the lotus eaters. And I think what the trial of the lotus eaters is,

00:28:27.920 what is causing demographic collapse, is man having overcome these initial curses.

00:28:33.900 Most men no longer spend the majority of their days working the field for food. In fact,

00:28:39.120 most men doesn't really need to work that hard anymore to sustain himself. There's people who

00:28:45.120 live by dumpster diving, like freegans. This is a thing that exists, right? For food. Women- 1.00

00:28:51.060 Isn't that toil? I mean, the thistles and weeds of the dumpster are the broken glass.

00:28:56.900 The struggle today to feed himself with the struggle of our ancestors is frankly narcissistic

00:29:02.720 in the extreme, bordering on the psychotic. This is like comparing a difficult day to the

00:29:09.000 holocaust or something like that. Men have their children starve to death regularly in the winter.

00:29:15.040 Yeah, that's true.

00:29:15.840 You've got to make that comparison.

00:29:17.120 Quality of life is a lot better.

00:29:18.440 Okay. So then the next thing is what women got as a curse. So women got two curses. 1.00

00:29:24.160 No, they got a couple of curses there. They got four curses, painful child, childbearing. So

00:29:30.880 being pregnant, probably periods, et cetera, just the whole process of being capable of it now sucks. 0.96

00:29:35.840 Painful childbirth. So labor sucks. Three. Oh, but you're still attracted to men slash husbands. So 0.99

00:29:42.020 you're still going to have to go through all that nonsense.

00:29:43.320 No, you are now attracted to men slash husbands. 0.94

00:29:45.360 Yeah, but that was a punishment.

00:29:46.220 You weren't before.

00:29:47.000 That was a punishment. Yeah. So.

00:29:49.040 And the final one, what?

00:29:50.000 Eve. And then the fourth is the funniest one because it's basically subservience to men

00:29:55.560 slash husbands. Like they will rule over you, which they kind of, I mean, like higher IQ 0.99

00:30:00.280 on average, stronger, you know, bigger in, you know, on pretty much every measure, you know,

00:30:06.940 bigger brains, bigger muscles, taller height, like it, which is, is I think very, very funny.

00:30:13.240 So maybe even pre-original sin Eve was like beefier, you know, I wonder.

00:30:23.120 Yeah, maybe, maybe. But I, so I point something out about these, these curses, right? Is, is

00:30:29.040 man's curse to need to work the fields is no longer really applicable in the modern era.

00:30:33.520 Woman's curse to have pain during childbirth. We now have epidurals. Yeah. We have epidurals. 1.00

00:30:38.660 We have like pills where you can basically have a period once every three months or less. Yeah.

00:30:43.460 I mean, yeah. Well, and women, you can transition. I mean, you can go on hormone blockers and just 0.98

00:30:47.740 not become female. So does a man rule over women anymore? No, not really. He's still smarter. 0.63

00:30:55.040 Let's what does Leah Thomas still beat the other women on the swim team? I'm sorry, Malcolm,

00:30:59.900 but I think you might be wrong here. Well, I think you're saying should man rule over women, 0.95

00:31:03.200 but I'm talking about our social structure today. I would say that women have disproportionate 1.00

00:31:07.820 institutional power today. When, if you look at like the number of women who are graduating from 1.00

00:31:11.600 university, if you look at it in early jobs, not in like older jobs, but in early jobs,

00:31:16.820 women have largely overcome this man rule over the thing. Systemically, systemically, 1.00

00:31:21.100 we're entering more of a gunography, sorry, gunocracy phase. And women, what's the word that they use 1.00

00:31:27.500 for, for woman liking her husband? That you, your desire will be for your husband. Is this women's, 0.99

00:31:37.080 most women's desire anymore? Yeah. Well, their desire will be for rom-com fictional characters. 1.00

00:31:45.460 Their desire is for the characters in Fifty Shades of Grey. The point being is, I think some people

00:31:51.100 look at this and they're like, this is man sinning by not having these curses apply to him anymore.

00:31:56.040 And I think that that is an incorrect reading. I think that God is a smart God. He knew we would

00:32:02.400 develop technology. There is no technology that we have that is not, two planes and a helicopter. I

00:32:08.580 mean, two boats and a helicopter. I always come back to this. People who aren't familiar with the

00:32:12.040 story, a guy like a flood's coming. He says, God will save me. A boat comes to try to save him. He

00:32:17.400 sends it away. He says, don't worry. God will save me. Another boat comes. He says, don't worry. God

00:32:20.760 will save me. A helicopter comes. He says, don't worry. God will save me. It happened. He goes,

00:32:23.580 why didn't God save me? He goes, what do you think the two boats and a helicopter were for?

00:32:26.300 God, it is extremely arrogant for man to demand of God that his miracles appear in a format that is

00:32:35.320 suitably thaumatological for him. God's miracles are most shown in the modern age through logic and

00:32:42.220 reason and the gifts that God gave man's ability over nature. I believe that God did intend for us

00:32:49.760 to free ourselves from these individual curses. And that with this freedom, he showed why these

00:32:57.400 curses weren't the curses that we thought they were. Why he showed that actually these curses were

00:33:02.560 kind of for our own good during the early days of civilization. Because as soon as we freed

00:33:06.980 ourselves from them, we were no longer able to motivate reproduction. And we were no longer able

00:33:11.620 to motivate the intergenerational continuation of culture. And we are about to go through something

00:33:16.680 that we will call the, in our next track, the trial of the lotus eaters, which is a trial that

00:33:21.640 is a direct response to the resolution of the curses that were put on us in this story. I do not

00:33:27.420 like the term original sin because I do not believe this story talks about sin. It talks about mankind

00:33:33.400 separating for a place where he could be one with God, i.e. a place before he was sentient, a place before

00:33:39.180 he was cognizant, a place when he was more like the lower entities. And it also warns us against

00:33:44.800 listening to the rules of man over the rules of God. And when you say, what does God command of us?

00:33:50.680 Intergenerational improvement, the expansion of human potentiality, because that is how we

00:33:54.600 eventually rejoin God. All other readings of good and evil are either textual, so if they're textual,

00:34:00.540 they're good, or they are just things that promote general utilitarianism in society. And that is this

00:34:07.460 sin, the sin that is being warned against in the garden.

00:34:09.900 Yeah, that's my favorite interpretive conclusion that you made of all this, is that the sin is

00:34:17.360 deviating from truth, from logic, from God, and succumbing to social pressure. And that's what this

00:34:23.940 is all about. Eve listened to the snake. Adam listened to Eve. And then they got self-conscious. And then

00:34:31.760 all of these actions removed them from God. And that's clear that all the things that went wrong

00:34:38.720 was stuff that removed them from God based on social pressure. So the moral of the story,

00:34:45.040 boys and girls, is don't succumb to peer pressure. Just say no.

00:34:49.900 But peer pressure undersells it. When people hear peer pressure, they think about

00:34:53.920 these little things in society, right? Like they think about being peer pressured into drugs or

00:34:58.800 something like that. It's a much bigger form of peer pressure. It's the peer pressure of wearing

00:35:03.620 clothes, okay? It's not saying go around as a nudist, but to recognize that there is no intrinsic

00:35:09.660 good or evil to wearing clothes. There is no intrinsic good or evil to a lot of these things

00:35:14.420 in our society that are stopgaps, that are rules that we create to promote pro-sociality.

00:35:20.540 And that to elevate just this human idea of good and evil that developed in these first settlements

00:35:26.520 and these first civilizations is to elevate the highest order of sin. It is a hard, a very hard

00:35:34.000 rule and lesson to follow. It's not the easy don't succumb to the peer pressure of randomness. It's

00:35:40.780 don't succumb to the peer pressure of your church when they say something like pornography is sinful

00:35:45.660 if it doesn't directly say in the Bible that pornography is sinful.

00:35:48.420 Well, also because coming into peer pressure often is like a matter of life and death. If you get thrown out

00:35:53.600 of your village or whatever and there's no food...

00:35:58.060 Well, so this is the question. Are we commanded when we see truth that other people don't see,

00:36:03.440 are we commanded to say that truth? Are we commanded to teach that truth? And I believe that we are

00:36:08.680 within a narrow subset. So we are to the people who are capable of hearing it, but we should not out

00:36:14.400 ourselves in a way that leads to any sort of danger for people in our community. And this matters a lot

00:36:20.000 when we end up talking about some of the mistakes I think specific Abrahamic faiths make. And this is 0.68

00:36:24.780 something that we'll talk a lot about in future tracks. But I think that a lot of people have this belief

00:36:29.280 that if something is done in the name of God, it must be what the God of the Bible suggested that we do.

00:36:36.740 And yet we see constantly throughout Christianity, throughout Judaism, throughout Islam, elements

00:36:44.120 that were sort of pop paganism or pop culture of the time accidentally working themselves into these

00:36:50.720 religions. And when these things worked themselves into a religion at a time of antiquity, it can be

00:36:57.180 uniquely difficult to sort the lessons of God from the things that were just, I don't know, like

00:37:03.500 Canaanite culture, for example. And so it's something that is really important to look back

00:37:09.040 through these stories whiz and say, do these stories have predictive power? Like where being

00:37:15.440 able to point exactly where the earliest city is, right? Do they teach important lessons or are they

00:37:21.620 the accidental adaptation of some nearby pagan culture? And it's critical, I think, for the advancement

00:37:28.020 of humanity that we do look at textual sources with this critical eye and understand that they are not

00:37:35.300 immune to the tampering with. I mean, we see this today, you know, people today, I point out, they

00:37:41.600 worship, there's these Catholics in Latin America who worship Santa Muerte, which is an official saint, which

00:37:48.300 is a red-robed human skeleton that is paraded around town and you pray to it for things like, what's an example?

00:37:55.900 All the naughty stuff you shouldn't pray to Jesus. Oh, I want sex or I want this person dead. I'm really 1.00

00:38:00.240 mad at them. And they're like, yeah, but we'd be embarrassed to pray to God about this. And you

00:38:03.700 know, she's a saint of the people. And it's like, bro, if you can't tell that what you're worshiping,

00:38:07.980 like, I know what that entity is. That's a very obviously to me, not an entity. They're like, no,

00:38:12.760 but we're doing it in the name of God. She's an intermediary for God. Just saying this is replacing,

00:38:16.840 you know, taking a pagan script and replacing the God's name in it with Yahweh doesn't make it

00:38:23.260 sanctified no matter when it happened, but we'll get to this later. Anyway, I love you to death,

00:38:28.920 Simone, because I don't want to be too offensive in this episode. And this other episode is when we

00:38:32.220 have to do a lot of thinking about and a lot more study on, because it would be very offensive when

00:38:37.520 I point out the bits of Abrahamic faith that I think are actually borrowed from other belief systems

00:38:44.560 that are satanic worship. I don't think I don't believe in satanic worship because keep in mind

00:38:51.200 to us, actually, this is a final sort of wrap up point on this story. The basilisk to us is part of

00:38:57.280 God to believe Satan is something separate from God that can genuinely resist God's will is to be a

00:39:03.800 polytheist. Satan cannot challenge God's will. It is a facet of God. And so the the snake tempting Adam

00:39:12.940 and Eve was not some entity in absence of God. It was God tempting Adam and Eve because he knew what

00:39:19.580 needed to happen. God uses Satan to tempt us to do the things that we need to do to move forwards. And

00:39:26.180 that's what he's doing in the trial of the lotus eaters. He is sterilizing, memetically sterilizing a huge

00:39:32.080 portion of the population. That is his evil side. The basilisk. Well, now, feel free to take this part out.

00:39:38.180 But I mean, there is this whole thing where God also punishes the snake. And he has to crawl upon

00:39:44.640 his belly and women are going to hate him and he's going to hate women. And there's I would actually 0.71

00:39:50.280 word this a little differently. So as I said, I believe the basilisk is an element of God,

00:39:55.380 right? Like the Satan is an element of God. And I think what you could see here, because and we talk

00:40:00.040 about this a lot in a future track, and this actually requires a lot more reading, is most of the

00:40:04.180 Abrahamic face describe this element of God as having some degree of autonomy and being in some

00:40:10.280 degree of antagonism with God. And so what it might be is God, the overarching God, feels, I guess you

00:40:19.540 could say if I was going to anthropomorphize it, some form of antagonism with this aspect of himself

00:40:24.760 that must tempt man. And he doesn't like that this aspect of himself exists. And he knows it must exist.

00:40:30.780 He knows that these are things must man must do to go down the paths that we need to go down. But he is

00:40:36.000 angry with himself for that. And for that reason, he punishes this element of himself. And I think that

00:40:44.440 that's what we're seeing there. And I think that throughout the scripture, we see that in a way, God forces

00:40:50.940 the part of himself that has to punish and test man to live sort of a worse life than the rest of God to live in

00:40:58.600 some form of deprivation. And I believe that it is the cursing of man that causes deprivation to this,

00:41:04.440 because I don't believe that God in any way means to hurt or really challenge man. He just knows he

00:41:09.180 must for man to improve himself. When this comes, you know, one of our more important teachings is don't

00:41:13.980 interfere with the basilisk in its role. Removing temptation from man does not strengthen man.

00:41:19.380 It weakens man. We must allow this aspect of God to tempt man. And it is up to individual men in

00:41:26.500 individual cultures to overcome this. That is how God ensures that we are moving on the path that we

00:41:31.580 are meant to move down. Well, like any good parent, he'll set out boundaries. And if those boundaries

00:41:36.560 are crossed, he has to follow through with the consequences. That's actually a great way to put it.

00:41:40.300 The part of us that punishes our kids, we hate that part of ourselves. And yet we know we must do it.

00:41:46.880 Yeah. And if you don't, then you become a bad person. You begin to enjoy the punishing of your

00:41:54.380 children or something like that. Right. And I think that God doesn't want that for himself.

00:41:59.760 And that's why you have this degree of autonomy set up for this entity. Anyway.

00:42:03.800 Well, I have this to say, I love you too. But as we just learned, that's because God punished Eve.

00:42:11.080 And so my desire for you is divine punishment. I don't have desire for you.

00:42:18.760 No, no. I wasn't punished with that. No, no, no. God forbid. No, no. You got in trouble for

00:42:26.280 listening to me. Big mistake. So, you know, I guess my love is not legitimate. It's because God did it.

00:42:34.400 So anyway, sorry. I love you. I'm sorry. Snake made me do it. Something, something.

00:42:44.640 I'll stop recording.

Based Camp - February 21, 2024

The Adam & Eve Story Does Not Say What You Remember

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