A question of Adam and Eve

[Bestbank Tiger]

Well, given that Santa was derived from the Norse god Odin, and that some Christians consider pagan gods to be demonic entities, and that Odin was the ruler of all the Gods... You may just be on to something.

Santa Claus was St. Nicholas of Myra.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

As far as I understand it is because in the beginning said God created a group of entities called Angels and Archangels. These were sentient, intelligent and capable of telling right from wrong.

And about fully half of them turned against him. So when he created humans, he did so without the knowledge of morality so that the only measure of right and wrong would be the one that he him self instills in them via commands. (like the 10 commandments and the ancient Jewish laws).

This is much like a dictator running a country. He may or may not run it for the good of the people. But he hewer wants to give them the freedom to chose and think for them self for fear that they will do that witch he finds is wrong for him or them self.


Once they did taste the apple however they recognized right from wrong, and understood why being kept in the dark was fundamentally wrong. And it had become just a mater of time until humans would stand up and say "No, I will not fallow your commands for they infringe my own sense of what is right."

Hence he had no choice but to banish them in the hopes that it would stop them from challenging him.


The big questions however are why. Why if he wanted to do so did he leave the apple tree so prominently displayed. Why did he place it in the Garden of Eden without so much as a picket fence and not say on the top of Month Doom in Mordor guarded by an army of Angels?

Could he have been so naive that he thought humans would not be tempted? or could have he been so certain of him self and his creation that he was blind to the possibility?

And if so, why does he seem time and time again mortally afraid that his own creations would usurp him?


It is quite an interesting topic when you think about it.

 

[Agent327]

Do you have an exact source on that little tidbit?

I suggest you reread your Genesis. It´s quite literally in there.

Cheers.

 

[Traitorfish]

Santa Claus was St. Nicholas of Myra.

The name "Santa Claus" was borrowed from St Nicholas, yes, but the folkloric figure of an old, white-bearded man who rides across the sky dishing out rewards for good behaviour is pagan in origin. This'd hardly be the first time that Christians have co-opted some element of pagan folklore, would it?

 

[Cheetah]

Santa Claus was St. Nicholas of Myra.

Yes, but the sled and reindeer are Norse, the timing of the celebration comes from the winter solstice, gift giving around specific occasions is much more ancient anyway, and his red coat, white beard and fatness is from a Coca-Cola commercial.

But remember:

 

[Miles Teg]

Yes, but the sled and reindeer are Norse, the timing of the celebration comes from the winter solstice, gift giving around specific occasions is much more ancient anyway, and his red coat, white beard and fatness is from a Coca-Cola commercial.

Someday, Congress is going to start listening to my ideas, and school children will have every page of Snopes tattooed on the inside of their eyelids.

 

[Cheetah]

Okay so Santa's image wasn't created by Coca-Cola, but it was at least decided upon by them.

 

[BuckyRea]

There was already good and evil. What God planned to protect Adam & Eve from was the knowledge of it. Actually, if you read Genesis, there were two different trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. It was a serpent, not a snake. There's actually two not entirely synchronized origin stories.

This is important, because the way the popular myth passes the story on down to us tells us more about the mythos that the society of today needs to hear, in a Jungian sense, than what the people at the different times of writing and rewriting the creation story wanted to communicate.

When I was a kid in the Church of Christ in the 60s, there was a lot more emphasis on Eve having been the disobedient one. Postfeminist recountings today emphasize the shared guilt of the first couple, while post-Oprah Americans caught up in today's "boo-hoo poor me" zeitgeist tend to tell the story as Adam & Eve being conned, as if Satan were somehow as bad as Chase Bank and the Tree of Knowledge was just a condo they didn't know they couldn't afford.

Another interpretation is that the Fruit of the Forbidden Tree represents puberty--the rounding and ripening of the woman's breasts and buttocks with sexual maturity--and that the Fall from the Garden was as inevitable as a baby chick's fall from the next; a necessarily painful growing experience. That is, the coming of age that Edenic couple made coincided with their emotional preparation for leaving the innocense of childhood and the protective garden of the father. Thus the sign of the loss of innocense coincides with the guys going to work, the girls painfully cranking out babies, and no one running around nekkid like they used to.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

So I've read up quite a bit on the old story of the Apple, Adam, and Eve and such, and I can't seem to grasp one thing I see as important in it all.

Besides the fact that God had commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, why would that be a bad thing to do?

I suppose what I mean is, why would God not want his creation to know the difference? Also, if they did not know the difference between good and evil, how could the very act of disobedience of God be seen as good or evil from their eyes?

Also, it seems that gaining knowledge from a plant led to the idea that all plant-based knowledge is deemed as evil in the west.

Could it not have been God's intent that we eat from it? After all, the snake was in the garden, which supposedly couldn't house evil inside, so God allowed the snake to be there as a tempter at the very least it seems.

And that's why the story makes no sense. Another reason why you cannot take (Abrahamic) religions seriously.

 

[Miles Teg]

Okay so Santa's image wasn't created by Coca-Cola, but it was at least decided upon by them.

Maybe, but it's kind of a stretch. The modern Santa existed for about thirty years without any help from Coca Cola, and the NY Time had already commented on how uniform it was. Maybe that wouldn't have stuck without Coke, maybe it would have, but you can't really say that Coke "decided" the matter.

 

[Cheetah]

But do you think the American image of Santa would have stuck if a company like Coca-Cola wouldn't have invested a lot of commercials into bringing this image to Europe and the rest of the world as well?

 

[uat2d]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY6Dn0_hBOY

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Lol I accidentally turned a discussion about the Bible into a discussion about Santa Claus.

 

[BuckyRea]

Gods evolve. If there's a modern supernatural mythos that unites people in the Anglosphere more than Santa Claus does, it'd surprise me. He's the perfect deification of western consumerism. The spirit of going shopping and buying stuff absolutely defines his 2 week holidays in ways that the core message of Jesus Christ can't even hope to compete with.

He's really kind of an updated, nicer version of Mammon.

 

[JollyRoger]

I'm kind of suprised the Castle Doctrine hasn't killed off Santa.

 

[Traitorfish]

Gods evolve. If there's a modern supernatural mythos that unites people in the Anglosphere more than Santa Claus does, it'd surprise me. He's the perfect deification of western consumerism. The spirit of going shopping and buying stuff absolutely defines his 2 week holidays in ways that the core message of Jesus Christ can't even hope to compete with.

He's really kind of an updated, nicer version of Mammon.

 

[_random_]

If Adam had gotten to the point where he could know good and evil and still choose good all the time, there would be no need to withhold the fruit. God doesn't strike me as the type to create something and have it remain entirely useless for all eternity. Adam was a spiritual infant, and thus was not yet prepared for that knowledge anymore than a physical infant is prepared for less mythical apples.

 

[Lillefix]

God doesn't strike me as the type to create something and have it remain entirely useless for all eternity.

So you don't believe that God created humans then? (there is a lot of useless stuff inside us)

sorry for going a bit offtopic.

 

[_random_]

So you don't believe that God created humans then? (there is a lot of useless stuff inside us)

sorry for going a bit offtopic.

God created animals with certain vestigial organs who were the ancestors of modern humans. To say that humans are completely useless does a bit of a disservice to our race.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I'm kind of suprised the Castle Doctrine hasn't killed off Santa.

yeah I would be a bit freaked out if a giant fat guy with a beard came falling down my chimney.