WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE STORY OF ADAM AND EVE
I don’t believe in a god who lives behind the scene, pulls the strings and has a strict body of dos and don’ts. I don’t believe in a god who punishes people for flouting his rules and rewards people for their obedience. This god was created by the human out of the human desire to be deified. Operant conditioning is purely and morbidly a human concept. Even animals are not barbaric enough to see any sense in it.
I believe in a self-regulatory universe. A universe in which the universe and the human are as similar as the seed and the tree. If there is a God, then he is only as far away as a sculptor is to his sculpture or as an object is to its shadow. The shadow is the 2-dimensional representation of the 3-dimensional object. Without the object, the shadow does not exist.
The human is made in the image of God, yet it is absurd to assume that the human looks like God in any physical representation. That would imply that God has a face.
God is spirit — John 4:24
In the original text, the word translated to spirit is the ancient Greek word Pneuma which is interpreted as the following nouns — wind, air, breath, breathing, soul, spirit — none of which have any physical form. Hence, when the Bible speak of the creation of man, especially in the first chapter of its first book, it does not refer to any man’s physical form. Humans simply got their physical form through evolution. Genesis speaks of the spiritual creation and maturation of the human being in an allegorical language. God creates and so, man, being created to be God, also creates just as God does, not more, not less.
Yet the human is not God just as the shadow is not the object. The second chapter of Genesis focuses on Adam and Eve. It would be interesting to consider that the story of Adam and Eve has nothing to do with the origin of humans or marriage. Adam originates from a Hebrew word that roughly means Earth or soil. Eve on the other hand means ‘Living’ or ‘to live’. The story of Adam and Eve was the marriage between life or being (‘us’ created in God’s image) which is metaphorically symbolized by Eve, a life-giving woman, and earth, materialism represented as Adam. Every moment of our lives, these forces fight within us — materialism and the life-giving force of the universe. Which do we settle for?
We learn from the story of Adam and Eve that the harmonizing of materialism and our spirituality is not complete if we do not address the issue of morality. Adam and Eve are placed in a self-sufficient universe — a garden referred to as the garden of Eden. The garden provided them with everything they needed. They were not so much placed in the garden as they were part of the garden. However, Adam and Eve were instructed not to consume the ideas of morality. Why?
Morality which is the idea of sin; good and evil as a single concept, implies that the human knows what is good and evil. Adam and Eve are a single human who look to harmonize their material and spiritual side. It is in this process they, just as the serpent promised them, would be like God, knowing what is good and evil. It is important to differentiate what it means to become like God and what it means to become God.
To be like God means to admit that God is supreme. However, God himself does not exist to the human psychic especially since humans are very material. The human then sets himself on a journey to know God to be like him. What is the best way to know a creator that you cannot see? By reading a book that other humans wrote about him? Sure it is important to know other people’s opinions of God or the ultimate source, yet it is self-deceit to depend entirely on them. To fully experience life, one has to live it and not depend on what other people think about life. The best way to know a creator you cannot perceive physically, just like the men who got the inspiration to write the collection of books that make the Bible, is to study his creations. The more you know about creation, the more you can perceive intuitively and subjectively what God is like.
At the core, those who want to be like God admit that God is a standard of perfection, and while they cannot reach him, their goal is to be the closest resemblance to him. This is an important difference. Adam and Eve did not set out to be like God. They set out to be God. Those who choose to be God elevate their sense of importance to a plain where they can judge others. They hold a moral air on everyone and themselves. They don’t rely on God’s creation to know God. In fact, they do not attempt to know God. Instead, they build a God who resembles them. These are the people who worship a God who has human attributes — God is jealous, he enjoys praise and worship, he punishes evil and rewards good and he has a son.
Adam and Eve fed on the ideas of morality when they ate from the fruit of knowledge between good and evil. Perhaps the mistake was assuming that one could attain spiritual height through physical means. It is the same way many people design a God who bears physical characteristics — an anthropomorphic God.
The story of Adam and Eve never happened in the past. The story allegorizes the struggle that happens every day within us as we try to balance materialism (Adam) and spirituality (Eve). Some of us attain these heights, like Adam and Eve did, through physical means — constructing an anthropomorphic god and spending so much time observing theological doctrines such as attending religious gatherings, reading our bible and even praying. Others realize that this journey is best attained by the purging of any love for the material. Which do you think is the path that makes the most sense?
