The Adam & Eve Story Does Not Say What You Remember
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Summary
In this episode, we re-visit the story of Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge. We re-read it with a new context and a new understanding of what really happened in the Garden of Eden.
Transcript
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by like Bible conspiracy theorists and stuff like that,
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that we didn't know where the Garden of Eden was.
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It like gives an exact location for the Garden of Eden.
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then God would not have let them walk around the garden nude.
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like a perfect knowledge of what's right and what's wrong
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because that's obviously something man does not have.
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Instead, knowledge of good and evil in this context
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to impart the knowledge of good and evil unto man.
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It was him making a decision independent from God.
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that this is one of the curses that was put on man,
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Well, I am so excited to be here with you today, Simone.
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You had done this thing recently where you're like,
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while also recognizing that when we've gone back
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it doesn't say what we remembered it having said.
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And yet it very explicitly says Adam had to work in Eden.
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I remember God breathing the life into Adam's mouth,
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Then he reseals the area that he cut with flesh.
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I was like, I remember like something more animalistic,
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We, so there were, but, but actually it's not just that.
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The larger themes weren't the themes I remembered.
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And this is something that we get into in the next,
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this Friday where you wanted to dig deep into the subject on the track.
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And I was just, I just haven't read it in a while.
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which is what's really going on with this story.
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with Eve and Adam doesn't have to work or anything like that.
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And a snake comes to Eve and Adam and tells them you should really eat this
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apple of knowledge that you've been told not to eat.
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And then Adam goes and he eats the apple of knowledge and God is mad about that.
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And then God kicks them out and curses, you know,
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women to have pain and childbirth and men to have to work all of their lives for, for food.
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That was not the story that I read for a number of reasons that I'd love to go deep,
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but I'm happy to have you, you take a shot at this first, Simone.
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What really surprised you in your interpretation of it when you reread it?
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I was, I was definitely surprised by a lot of the things you were.
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I just thought that they walked around this perfectly
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maintained garden and just picked fruit off the trees and kind of enjoyed that.
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And I was also surprised by God's warning as to why one should not eat from the tree of the knowledge
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of good and evil in that, like he says, if you do it, you'll die.
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Whereas before I thought it was just like, no, no, no, don't do that.
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I was also surprised that there are kind of two big deal trees, right?
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There's the tree of life and there's the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
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And no one, no one really talks about the other tree.
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So I had vaguely remembered the tree of life, but I had understood that the way it worked
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is that the tree of life kept a man alive forever.
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So long as he lived in the garden and was eating for the tree of life.
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It's implied in the story that that is not true.
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If man ever once ate from the tree of life, he would live forever.
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He never touched the tree of life, which also to me kind of implies,
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why is this being kicked out of Eden happened almost immediately within the context of the
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story and that he had never eaten from that other tree either, that he wasn't banned from
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Well, yeah, I mean, at the end, it's kind of implied that God is worried about him now
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eating from the tree of life because then he could live forever.
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Okay, so I'll go into the larger context of the story here as I re-understand it.
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So first, I want to give some quotes here that people might be surprised about.
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The, what man had to work in the garden of Eden?
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The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of
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Very explicitly, he was tending this garden and it wasn't a garden that grew automatically.
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Another thing that was really interesting is it pointed out that plants, even magical
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plants in the garden of Eden cannot grow without water.
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And because it did not rain in those days, God had the water spring up from under the
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ground and then secede a number of times, like a global flood almost, but like a small
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watering level before man was brought into this garden to get it ready for man.
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But then after that, man had to take care of it.
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And it implied that at least part of taking care of it was the watering of it because this
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water rising and automatically watering seems to have stopped when man came into the garden.
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Oh, I didn't pick that up, but I mean, tending was definitely, is obvious.
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So the other big thing, and this is one that you really picked up on and wanted to pontificate
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on quite a bit, is man was not tempted by the serpent to eat from the tree of good
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It's very, every time it's talked about, it's the knowledge of good and evil.
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And this is something I didn't pick up on the first time I read it.
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But anyway, so how did the serpent trick go through this part of the story?
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So the serpent, nah, God, well, he approaches Eve and to her specifically says, oh, you know
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He first made all the animals in the Garden of Eden, and I had forgotten this, to help
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out Adam, because God thought it was kind of mean to have Adam do all this work by himself.
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But none of them turned out to be really good helpers.
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Oh, I read that part as meaning something a little bit more salacious than that.
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You thought this was about them knowing each other.
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So God put all the animals in front of man, and he had them name them, and then none of
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Well, what does that mean, suitable companion, if a suitable companion is a woman?
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Well, no, but God said that he shouldn't toil alone.
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But for the man, there was not found a helper as his partner.
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And remember, God, so at 2.18, then the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be
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He's trying to get him a helpful worker and, you know, danger noodles.
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I'll tell you what, oxen are definitely more helpful than women plowing a field.
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It is really funny that after God finds Adam and Eve, and he gets mad at Eve after asking
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what they've done, he says to the man, because you've listened to the voice of your wife and
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you've eaten of the tree of which I command you, blah, blah, blah.
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But that was Adam's problem was listening to his wife.
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But I actually read this differently in context, and I'll explain what I think the actual correct
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So before I go further with this story, something I really want to talk about that was quite
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transformative for me is I am reading this story idly, right?
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And I can come up with hypotheses about what I think that this is supposed to be telling us.
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As I believe, God always tried to reveal as true a truth as he could to man when he was
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giving man true revelations, and it wasn't just, you know, pagan nonsense.
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And so this, I think, was one of the true revelations.
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And if it is one of the true revelations, then it should have contained as true a story
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as he could convey to early man telling them some story.
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So the story that it seemed to me like he was telling was the story of man building civilization
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of the first cities, of the development of human sentience and culture.
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And so I read the story, and something that just like immediately jumped out at me that
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was really weird is every time I had read this story as like a child, I had, and I think
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this was pushed by like Bible conspiracy theorists and stuff like that, that we didn't know where
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the Garden of Eden was. Like the Garden of Eden was at some magical place, and some people
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hypothesized it's in Africa, and Joseph Smith hypothesized it's in America. And so like I,
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and I read it, and it like gives an exact location for the Garden of Eden. And that shocked me to my
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Because it starts with that. The Garden of, before Adam even shows up, they're like really specific
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about where it is. Yeah, so I should be clear what it says. It says the Garden of Eden
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is at the headwaters of four rivers. Two of the rivers don't correlate with rivers that we know
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about today. So they could have been streams, or their names could have been changed.
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Maybe they dried up. I mean, you know, geology happens.
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Whatever. But two of the rivers, we definitely know what rivers they are. It's the Tigris and
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the Euphrates River. Well, we know where the Tigris and Euphrates River's headwaters are. Like,
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it's not a vague thing. The headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates River, well, I have to pull
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up the name of that, is the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey. Okay? And I'll put this on a map
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on the screen. Now, something really interesting happened. I was like, okay, if I am accurate,
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if this is a story about the development of the first human cities, and the development of Bronze
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Age man, then I should look up, you know, this transition of man from being like an animal to being
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like a human as we think of him today, I should look up, what's the oldest city that we know of today?
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Hmm. And shockingly, and this is one of those moments that I keep having when I'm looking at
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Bible stuff, and I'm like, what? Shockingly, it's a less than two-hour drive from the Taurus
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Mountains. Sorry, I made a mistake here. It is actually in the Taurus Mountains. It is not a
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two-hour drive from the Taurus Mountains. I was looking at where Google had put the pin for the
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Taurus Mountains on Google Earth, not taking into account that the Taurus Mountains aren't an exact
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point on the map. So it was exactly right as to where the first city was.
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This is accurately recalled. Now, keep in mind, this settlement was settled around 10,000 years ago.
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The oldest that we think that the story of Adam and Eve is is maybe 5,000 years old.
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Or 6,000 was what I was getting when I looked this up, yeah.
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Yeah. So they were remembering something about as far in their past as the writing of the story of
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Adam and Eve is from our past, and a pretty exact location. Now, keep in mind, this was likely written
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by people in what is today Israel, or maybe Egypt, or maybe, maybe in Mesopotamia. But all of those
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areas are pretty far away from this location. The other thing that's really interesting is it said that
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when man left the garden, he left to the east. That was the direction that civilization spread from
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there. Now, if you know your Bronze Age history, you know that this is where civilization spread
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from this founding location, that most of the early civilizations were in the east.
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Then it has something that sounds like a very bizarre contradiction. At the beginning of the story,
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it said that God made the Garden of Eden in the east. Well, if God made the Garden of Eden in the
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east and man left from it in the east, that makes no sense from the context of the original storytellers.
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That would have sounded like an anachronism. And yet, from the perspective of most of the Judeo-Christian
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followers today, the garden is in the east. In fact, there are very, very few Judeo-Christian
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Turkey-yay now, yeah. So he, they changed their name for people who are wondering what she's talking
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about there. That was really, like, chilling to me. And I think it shows this hypothesis of what
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I'm talking about, of God trying to explain man's early history. But then the two other things that
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really, like, just chilled me when I was rereading it is I had thought that man had eaten an apple of
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knowledge. Or at least an apple of, like, knowledge of good and evil. And that always
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really confused me. Why wouldn't God want man to have the knowledge of good and evil? That doesn't
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seem to make sense, right? I was like, I must be misinterpreting the story because I can't imagine
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God doing that. And if you read the story like a child, it appears that that's what's happened.
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But if you read it like an adult, you recognize something. What does man do the moment he eats the
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apple? He is ashamed by his nudity, and so is the woman. And so they hide from God with fig leaves,
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and then they want to wear clothes. Well, this is really interesting. Nudity. So it's said that this
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this knowledge of good and evil, of the type the tree provided, God had. If it was evil to be nude,
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then God would not have let them walk around the garden nude. One would hope. If it was truly evil.
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Well, not one would hope, but it's said that God has this true knowledge of good and evil as well.
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God has a lot of weird things. He also has additional knowledge to this, that this is not real evil.
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Is being nude really evil? No, it's not really evil. It is a social construct
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that man tells other man about what is evil. It is an evolved idea around what is evil,
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around social norms and everything like that. Yeah, this is like something we actively need
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to tell our kids. No, when we go outside, you do have to wear pants. And I remember my parents
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telling me that because that was kind of weird. But this is critical, right? Because it now makes
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some other things make sense. We know that women in our society are much more prone to following
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social consensus than men are and are much more prone to generating these types of social norms.
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As is the case with Mr. Danger Noodle telling her what to do.
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Exactly, right? So we learn that you need to guard against this sort of social pressure that can come
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from your wives and from women in society. In a big way in society right now, I think that this is
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potentially one of the problems we're having is that the gender that is more susceptible to social
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conformity has equal power. And I do want women to have equal power in society, but there are negative
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consequences towards this social conformity, and it can lead to virtue spirals and stuff like that.
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But let's talk about specifically the kind of evil that man engaged in, because this is so interesting.
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The evil that he engaged in is a type of evil that is disproportionately engaged in within religious
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communities. It is following man's social norms, okay, above God's effort in the word of God.
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That is the type of evil that man ate here. And it works perfectly for the theming of the story.
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If the theming of the story is about man first creating settlements, like small settlements that he was
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living in, and then expanding out and creating the first civilization, the first cities, when man was
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living in the woods, he didn't have this form of evil, right? He didn't have this form of good and evil
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because he was just living in small trial structures, right? Like they might've had some rules, but they
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were much less developed than what began to evolve in cities. The good and evil of cities is the
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condemnation of walking around nude because it has negative social consequences. And I think that
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this has a bigger lesson to take away from it. And it's a very important lesson to me, which is
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what society says is good is what is pro-social. What society says is evil is what is anti-social.
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Society tells us these things because those are the ideas that promote the best interest of a general
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hedonist living in society, right? If you were trying to promote aggregate hedonism within society,
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which is really just the maximization of the environmental stimuli that caused your ancestors
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to have the most surviving offspring. It is a saying of triviality. Those rules of good and evil that we
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live by in our society, that is original sin. General utilitarianism is original sin. Banning pornography
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is original sin. These are the things that are original sin, right? Not following directly what
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is in the Bible and only what's in the Bible is original sin and only God's will that is revealed
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through iterative revelation. And that was so transformative of me to get that understanding.
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Yeah. No, that is so interesting because it's also not what anyone takes away from it. I've never heard
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anyone have that interpretation before Malcolm, so I find this very entertaining.
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Well, it also, you know, tells us a lot about starting civilization, right? Is that, well, actually
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this comes to the next interpretation, which is important to understand starting civilization. So
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God, the concept of original sin, like eating the apple being original sin, I don't really get that from
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the piece. It doesn't really talk about sin anywhere. The snake tries to convince man to eat
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the apple because it says that it will make man more like God. And man wants to eat the apple because
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it will make man more like God. A lot of the sin in what is happening here is a quest for God's
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knowledge. A quest for shortcuts to God is being condemned here.
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Well, and that's actually something that really did surprise me from reading this again. I'm sorry to
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interrupt, but like when I read 3 to 322, then the Lord God said, see, the man has become like one of
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us, knowing good and evil. And now he might reach out his hand and take all stuff from the tree of
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life and eat and live forever. And that's when he's, oh, we got to guard the tree of life. But he said,
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so the man has become like one of us. That's really interesting. Like you say, it's more being on his
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level in a weird way, I guess. So what does the story mean when it says the type of knowledge of good and
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evil that man gained is the type that God had, and that man in a way became more like God when
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getting this type of knowledge of good and evil? What it clearly means in context is not knowledge
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of good and evil like a perfect knowledge of what's right and what's wrong, because that's obviously
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something man does not have, nor was it something that he showed when he first like put on clothes to
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hide his nakedness from God. Instead, knowledge of good and evil in this context means man's ability
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to make decisions about what is good and evil in the same way that God makes decisions about what
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is good and evil. Without this knowledge or ability, what man thinks is good and evil or what man knows
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is good and evil is just what God lays out as good and evil. Knowledge of good and evil in this context
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means knowledge of good and evil that contrasts or has the potential to conflict with God's knowledge
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of good and evil. And what's really ironic and in a way beautiful in the way this story works,
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it would mean that the tree of knowledge of good and evil didn't actually need to have any special or
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magical properties to it to grant this ability to man. Because before he ate from that tree,
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what was good and evil was simply the rules that God laid out. But the only rule that God had laid out
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was to not eat from that tree. So in eating from that tree, man already took unto himself when he
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reached and grabbed for that apple. That was when he was taking on to himself the knowledge of good and
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evil. It wasn't biting the apple that gave him this ability. It was the fact that he thought he knew
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better than God about what was good and what was evil in making the decision to eat from that tree.
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And this reading's interpretation is actually made pretty clear by the text by a rather odd remark that
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God makes that outside of this reading doesn't make a lot of sense. That if you touch the tree of the
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knowledge of good and evil, that's what leads to the consequences. Not just eating from the tree.
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This interpretation actually completely fixes the problem of an individual saying, well, then why
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did God put this tree that gave man knowledge of good and evil, but then banned man from eating from
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the tree, right? That seems like a very odd thing for God to do. There was never a tree of knowledge of
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good and evil in the garden. It was just a regular tree. The important tree, the magic tree, was the tree
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of life. He didn't ban man from eating the tree of life. He banned man from eating from the tree of the
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knowledge of good and evil. And he named the tree that because he knew in eating from that tree, man
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would take onto himself the responsibility of knowledge of good and evil. A incorrect responsibility
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of knowledge of good and evil. There was never any deceit or trick on the behalf of God. God just knew
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because he knows all things that will happen. You know, we believe in predestination that that was
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the path that man would take. And that was the important role that that completely non-magical
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and regular tree would have in the history of reality. Yeah. So, but the other interesting one
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is the curses. So when I read this, one of the curses that I could have sworn was put on man. And there
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is a reading of this, that this is one of the curses that was put on man was to die. That before this,
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man would have lived forever. That isn't exactly one of the curses that's put on man.
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Still that I take away from it. Hold on, hold on. I'll read the lines because it's, it's pretty
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interesting, but there is a way of interpreting this that that was not one of the curses. That was a
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consequence of eating from the tree of good and evil, but not one of the curses. So I will read the
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quote here that really makes it sound like a consequence. And the Lord God said, the man has now
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become like one of us knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and
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take also from the tree of life and eat it and live forever. So Lord God banished him from the
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garden of good and even to work from the ground, which had been taken. So if you see what's being
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said there, the being driven from the garden of Eden is not one of the punishments and not being
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allowed to eat from the apple that makes you live forever is not one of the punishments.
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It is a consequence. It is somebody who has the knowledge of good and evil, cannot also live
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forever. You can't have both of these things at once. It's unless you are God. Now take our
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interpretation of how God works and how man works, right? Man is made God eventually millions of years
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from now, a God that lives outside of time through this cycle of intergenerational improvement,
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right? Through this cycle of one generation, martyring themselves for the next generation.
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If man lived forever, he would not be able to improve fast enough or meaningfully enough to ever
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become God. This is why ultimate life extension beyond just like health extension is sinful. It is
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because it is to eat from the tree of everlasting life and stop this cycle of intergenerational
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improvement. But it's another reading to this is that before man had the knowledge of good and evil,
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before he had civilization, before he had what we would think of as cognizance or sentience,
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he didn't really understand death. As I've pointed out, it wasn't exactly that man never died in the
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garden. That's not exactly said. It's that death wasn't meaningful to him in the garden. He, like all
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entities, pre-cognizance, pre-sentience, death isn't really important to them in the way it's important to us
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because they have kids and they understand that their goal is to have kids. You know, a praying
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mantis that has sex with another praying mantis and gets his head bitten off. To an animal, sacrificing
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yourself for your children is often a natural thing to do. Or you don't even realize you're doing it.
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It just happens. You're not worried about it. You don't even realize you're doing it because death
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is not meaningful in that way. In a way, this knowledge of death and an elevation of death,
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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-
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.
00:29:18.440
Okay. So then the next thing is what women got as a curse. So women got two curses.
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.
00:29:35.840
Painful childbirth. So labor sucks. Three. Oh, but you're still attracted to men slash husbands. So
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.
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
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.
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
00:30:47.740
not become female. So does a man rule over women anymore? No, not really. He's still smarter.
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,
00:31:03.200
but I'm talking about our social structure today. I would say that women have disproportionate
00:31:07.820
institutional power today. When, if you look at like the number of women who are graduating from
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,
00:31:21.100
we're entering more of a gunography, sorry, gunocracy phase. And women, what's the word that they use
00:31:27.500
for, for woman liking her husband? That you, your desire will be for your husband. Is this women's,
00:31:37.080
most women's desire anymore? Yeah. Well, their desire will be for rom-com fictional characters.
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
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
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
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.