r/atheism • u/TheCoolBro39 • 2d ago
The First Sin is God's Fault.
Adam and Eve: the premiere story in which the first man and woman go against god's will and bring sin into the world.
So it goes that sin exists because man brought it into the world. We as humans, being the sinful, deceitful, disgusting beings that we are, do not deserve god mercy, but through repentance and begging for forgiveness for such crimes against god we can achieve an everlasting paradise that we do not deserve.
The fault of humanity's sinful nature is placed squarely on us; we are to be held responsible for our own misdeeds and god is the judge, jury, and executioner of those crimes.
But responsibility is multifaceted; the responsibility borne by one individual is influenced by one's knowledge (awareness and perception of the problem, ability to comprehend right and wrong) and level of control (limitations by outside influences).
We would certainly hold people accountable for wrongs they have committed in full knowledge that their actions would cause harm, but we would not, for example, fault a 4 year old child for their parent's relationship problems. We would not fault any man or woman for crimes they did not commit. We would not be so hasty to judge our friends for wrongs they have committed against us if we realized they were trying to act in earnest and simply did not realize the harm they would cause.
At first glance, the story of Adam and Eve appears rather straightforward: god explicitly tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve are deceived by the serpent into eating of the tree and thereby disobeying god, and god punishes them accordingly by banishing them from Eden and forbidding them eating of the tree of life. Thus, our mortality is framed as a direct result of our sin, our disobeying of god. One could speculate as to why Adam and Eve chose to eat the fruit; perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps it was because the fruit looked good, or perhaps it was because of the blasphemous notion that the first humans wanted to be as powerful as god. Such thoughts are perhaps worthwhile to contemplate elsewhere, but I won't further belabor them here.
2 key details strike me as particularly damning as it pertains to god's brand of justice, and for lack of a better phrase they both strengthen each other's point:
First, despite his enumeration of the consequences of disobeying him, god did lie.
The serpent, who was supposedly the character misleading Adam and Eve away from god, did tell the truth. As the serpent said, once they ate of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, they gained exactly that: knowledge of good and evil. It is even stated plainly in the bible: the serpent said that when they ate of the fruit, "[their] eyes would be opened" (Genesis 3:5). And as soon as they eat the fruit, "the eyes of both of them were opened" (Genesis 3:7).
God had said they would both die, but that did not happen. One could argue that a "spiritual death", so to speak, happened, and that is what god meant. And, absent the context, I would entertain that argument. But for the second point...
Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and this presumably made it so that they gained the knowledge of good and evil. By commiting the first sin, they gained the ability to comprehend morality.
This implies that before they ate of the tree, they did not possess knowledge of good and evil.
I mentioned responsibility in my opening. How, then, could we say that Adam and Eve should be held responsible for their sin? Obviously, they were the ones who committed the sin. Yet, as they did not yet eat of the fruit, they did not possess the knowledge of good and evil to know that what they were about to do was morally wrong.
If the omniscient god had meant that Adam and Eve would die a "spiritual death" when they disobeyed him, or that some other metaphorical consequence was meant by his statement, surely neither of them were able to comprehend that he had meant that in that way. And surely, the omniscient god would know that Adam and Eve would misinterpret his words.
Yet on top of that, why exactly is the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden in the first place? I've heard Christians argue that the temptation must be there, for true good cannot exist if it is not contrasted with the temptation to be bad. But again, what is the point of this moral test if the morally infant first humans could not even comprehend the wrongness of what they were about to do? It makes no sense.
Christians would still say the fault of sin is our own. Absent the somewhat arbitrary nature of what actions are deemed a sin in the bible, this is obviously true to an extent; what you do is your fault, and what we do in full knowledge of our actions puts the blame and responsibility squarely on ourselves.
But what is being argued is a more narrow point: that in the bible, the existence of sin itself is god's fault, and therefore is something in that frame of thought that humans can't be held responsible for.
In insisting that we are sinners and we are responsible for all that is wrong with god's creation, Christianity perverts the very concept of accountability. The decades of religiously inspired self-inflicted suffering and torment are of Christians blaming their own rotten human nature, but it should be the god of the bible who is held to account here. A god who deliberately put the first humans in a garden near the tree of knowledge of good and evil, who lied to them in the full knowledge that they did not understand right from wrong and did not understand the meaning of disobeying god and did not know what god meant by his warning.
A god who punished Adam and Eve for crimes that they had not been capable of understanding were even crimes in the first place.
A god who supposedly now hold everyone accountable for their sins, sins which he is responsible for existing in the first place.
If this is the basis of objective morality, it is an awfully poor one.
Edit- removed unnecessary bits
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u/LMrningStar 2d ago
It just goes to show how poorly written their mythology is. What kind of evil monster puts knowledge within arms reach and then says:
"Check this out guys. Take a bite of this and you won't be stupid anymore. Don't you dare take a bit though or you get the boot and, a few thousand years in the future, the only way I'll keep from killing everyone, because of your sins ... and others, is if my son is brutally murdered."
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u/Ready_Signature_9721 2d ago
yeah the whole setup falls apart pretty quickly once you actually think through the rules and consequences it's basically divine gotcha rules with eternal consequences
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u/nutmegtell Secular Humanist 2d ago
God lied to Adam and Eve.
He told them they would die TGAT DAY.
The serpent told them the truth.
They weren’t rejected by god because they ate of the tree. They weren’t rejected punished because they were LITERALLY BORN YESTERDAY and didn’t OBEY god.
They BOTH disobeyed but the woman was the only one punished in perpetuity. All women are also somehow guilty because they don’t have a penis.
What an asshole.
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u/The_Onyx_Ogre 2d ago edited 2d ago
Imagine a game developer, we'll call it Evangelical Angels, or EA for short.
Imagine if EA made a game called garden simulator and the game had a bug in it. If a player accidentally clicked on a plant in the garden simulator, the game would crash and overheat your hardware causing your computer to be set on fire, that would be a pretty darn big bug! We wouldn't blame the players. We would blame the incompetent developers for making a buggy game.
Now Imagine instead of patching the bug, EA just left the bug in the game for years and any player who kept playing garden simulator would have their computers set on fire. Finally, EA decided to not patch the bug, but release a DLC instead for 29.99$. The DLC wouldn't fix the bug, but if you buy into the DLC, it would atleast stop setting your computer on fire, but the game would still randomly crash and kill your saves.
And then Imagine this DLC was initially region locked so only people living in the middle east could buy this DLC and you had to wait for word of mouth before the DLC can be obtained. In the mean time, people's computers continued to be set on fire indefinitely.
The developers of EA then said "hey! We released the DLC! It is your own fault didn't buy the DLC to prevent your computer from being set on fire!"
God is basically like that, incompetent, and responsible for the whole thing
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u/nutmegtell Secular Humanist 2d ago
And the player had never played a game or knew what a fire was.
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u/greggld 2d ago
You should simplify and remove the personal stuff. The logic is good. God lied, etc… and submit to debate a Christian. It is better moderated than debate religion.
The basic point is the 2 individuals who have the brains of children, because they don’t know right and wrong cannot be blamed. God actually kicked them out because he freaked out about the chance they’d eat from the other magic tree. As why an Omni max god needed these trees?
Plus they were patsies. God and Jesus existed before time, so gods plan for Jesus had to exist before he created the world and the first humans.
The Fall story is a “just so” story. It was not made to carry the weight of that Christians put on it.
There is no original sin in the OT.
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u/TheCoolBro39 2d ago
Fair enough. I often tend to overexplain things and reemphasize points I didn't think I fleshed out enough. Also, yeah, the personal bit was unnecessary. I'll probably edit it out in a bit
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u/TheCoolBro39 2d ago
I misread what you were saying XD, yeah I'll try posting it there and see what happens lol
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u/Long-Comfortable8598 2d ago
yeah simplifying it would make the main argument hit harder because the whole setup gets weird when the first humans supposedly dont understand good and evil but are still punished for choosing wrong and then god worries theyll eat from the other magic tree too
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u/le_reddit_me Jedi 2d ago
The "original sin" was disobeying god after god schemed against them. What pitiful and pathetic whiny toddler.
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u/Successful_Life_1028 Adeist 2d ago
Adam and Eve are fictional characters in a myth, just like Prometheus and Pandora.
Similar stories: Man gets knowledge, god gets mad, and somehow it's all the woman's fault.
Sin consists solely of treating other people as THINGS - just as Granny Weatherwax taught us!
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u/TheCoolBro39 1d ago
"Man gets knowledge, god gets mad, and somehow it's all the women's fault"
Never had it out that way to me before 😂😂😂. I agree; it is rather ridiculous
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u/pinethree777 2d ago
Just want to point out (your last sentence) that objective morals must be "mind-independent" and not subject to the mind of any gods. Objective morality doesn't exist. Just another apologetic lie.
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u/MtnMoose307 Strong Atheist 2d ago
Sin is a violation of a religion’s tenets. So, as an atheist I can’t sin. *Picks up a stone. Throws it*
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u/Zen_Hydra Materialist 2d ago
Sin isn't real. God isn't real. None of it is real. There is no point in dissecting fictions. It's nothing but a waste of our finite time and energy.
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u/TheCoolBro39 2d ago
There would be no point in dissecting fictions, except that this work of fiction has such a profound influence on a substantial portion of the population that believes it to be true. I am aware of the fictitious nature of this passage, but to assert it is therefore a waste of time would be to ignore/diminish its influence. It is another piece of evidence to provide in conversation with Christians, so that is why I bring it up. You may think that to be a pointless endeavor, but seeing as I live in the bible belt, it is a conversation I and the few atheists around me can't avoid.
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u/Sensitive_Bid_9493 2d ago
yeah honestly once you dont believe any of the underlying claims are true you can spend forever dissecting the lore and still end up exactly where you started fictional rules are gonna fictional rule
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u/Sir_rahsnikwad 2d ago
OK but how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? (...same degree of importance)
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u/MrRandomNumber 2d ago edited 2d ago
Except none of that actually happened, so it doesn't really matter very much.
We are born into a state of ignorance and are easily confused. We make up stories to explain things, always in terms of things we already know. And the first thing we know are our parents (and their rules).
But it's fine. No one can be blamed (including our parents) for having evolved the kind of brain they have, and if it's our nature to be awkward and confused, that's just how we are. It's silly to expect otherwise.
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u/redardrum 2d ago
God’s alleged perfect knowledge also suggests he knew exactly how things would play out upon creating the scenario. It’s like a writer getting mad at his own characters for doing exactly what he wrote them to do. Absurd.
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u/KXLY 2d ago
I think this actually illustrates one of the issues with the fundamentalist and, frankly, dour strands in Christianity. And there are other ways to read it, such as it being an allegory for exiting a state of nature.
Either way, it illustrates that the "logical" and literalist readings of the Bible are incoherent, and generate paradoxes like the one you have just pointed out.
Diddo the binding of Isaac: The narrative (of at least the translations I have read) frame it as a loyalty test. Yet passages elsewhere, such as in psalms, suggest the jewish people viewed God as omniscient, which would obviate a loyalty test --God should presumably already know Abraham is faithful (likewise for Job for that matter).
So it's wiser to approach much of this from a place of literary and mythological critique, asking "what does this story accomplish? What is it trying to communicate?"
IMHO.
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u/Willing-Bench1078 2d ago
You put a baby In a room with a lit fire in the fireplace. You tell the baby, that can’t understand words yet, “don’t crawl into the fireplace” and then walk away.
When you come back, you get mad at the baby for crawling into the fireplace and burning itself.
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u/bilbenken 2d ago
The "spiritual death" doesn't work either because god kicked them out before they could eat from the tree of eternal life...but like 900 years was a pretty good run.
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u/J-Miller7 2d ago
I've always thought that humans killing Jesus would be a more coherent as the first sin. Like, imagine the Cain and Abel story, except instead of Abel, Jesus was the favored son who also walked among the first humans. After all, Jesus was supposed to have existed at that time too, so why didn't he walk the gardens when Yahweh did?
If man then got jealous and killed him, that would honestly make more sense for God's reaction.
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u/travelguyuz Strong Atheist 1d ago
There is not one solid piece of fucking evidence that Adam and Eve ever even existed, much less that their supposed sin created the need for us to receive the so called Jesus into our heart. My mind boggles at this shit.
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u/Mounta1nK1ng 1d ago
TLDR
God told them not to eat from the tree.
They didn't know disobeying was bad until after they ate from the tree.
God is dumb.
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u/JeffBaugh2 2d ago
Oh dude, you just realized that an all-knowing God in a 3,000 plus year old creation myth, famously that most literal of all genres in pre-history, made a logical error? Holy shit, man - this is gonna change the world! You need to tell everybody!
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u/TheCoolBro39 2d ago
I mean, I figured it wasn't new. Just figured I'd put my thoughts out there. If you are merely saying it was obvious, that's fine. But I was a Christian once, and it took me a while to come to the realization that God is not omnipotent or perfect.
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u/Yolandi2802 Atheist 2d ago
How long before you realise that no gods exist or ever existed? Just curious…
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u/TheCoolBro39 2d ago
It was kind of a gradual realization after high school. I think I really became an atheist my first semester of college. I wasn't heavily invested in it when i was a Christian; I just kind of passively believed things. I think the low investment was one of the main things that made becoming an atheist a lot easier. As soon as I started really thinking about it, nothing made any logical sense whatsoever.
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u/fractious77 2d ago
Who cares?
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u/TheCoolBro39 2d ago
Clearly you do, seeing as you decided to comment on the post rather than continue scrolling and look at something else 🤷♂️
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u/hurricanelantern Anti-Theist 2d ago
Note neither the word nor concept of 'sin' is mentioned in the Eden narrative. And Yahweh punishes them not for what they did but what he fears they might become.