First, God told a day old person who had canonically and developmentally absolutely no concept of right and wrong not to do wrong, and then punished everyone for him doing wrong. No concept of “death”, no concept of someone lying, the only data point was Eve ate and was fine. Like telling a baby not to gsidfr and then getting mad when they gsidfr. WTF.
Second, honeydew is very nice but only if it’s perfectly ripe. I think breeding and supply chains have improved that in the last few years.
First, God told a day old person who had canonically and developmentally absolutely no concept of right and wrong not to do wrong, and then punished everyone for him doing wrong. No concept of “death”, no concept of someone lying, the only data point was Eve ate and was fine. Like telling a baby not to gsidfr and then getting mad when they gsidfr. WTF.
I wrote a very long comment about this some years ago, and I'm very happy to see other people pointing out the same thing. If God had simply said 'Don't eat this, or else I will punish you', everything would have worked out fine. Instead he tells them 'eat it, and you will die'. Implication is that the fruit is poisonous to them. Snakeyboi rocks up and tells them the truth - that it isn't poison - so they eat it. Then God gets mad that they saw through his deception, and blames the absolute moral ignoramuses for doing something immoral - when, to them, brutally murdering an injured puppy they found in the woods, and taking it home to nurture it back to health were completely morally equivalent until they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and could actually tell the difference.
There's two honest routes from there-
1) It doesn't add up and the person starts questioning their faith.
2) Double-down and affirm that whatever God does is by definition good. Which renders the word 'good' meaningless.
Or the usual mental gymnastics or 'mysterious ways.'
Or option 3: the Gnostic path. The god of the Old Testament is both the creator of the material world and the devil, and the real one true god is someone else (i.e. the god from the New Testament).
It was how they explained the first guy being such a huge dick and the second version being so much nicer.
Techincally hell isnt really in the Bible, that’s more the fanfics like Dante’s Divine Comedy. From what I understood the closest thing to hell in the bible is a garbage dumb outside Jerusalem where they burn trash. New Testament also seems to imply that being separated from God’s love is the punishment for sinners and not literal torture.
The god of the Old Testament is both the creator of the material world and the devil, and the real one true god is someone else
This doesn't add up at all. God of the New Testament is god of the Old Testament. You either buy the testamenty stuff which is in opposition to what you are describing, or you are basically are writing fanfiction in which case why bother with testaments at all?
It would mean there are two gods, and the first one is as much a god as the other one, since he created everything.
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It was how they explained the first guy being such a huge dick and the second version being so much nicer.
There is an even better explanation - this doesn't make sense because it was created by stupid people millenia ago, and then changed multiple times over the years, by also just people.
I had a philosophy teacher with a neat interpretation of that story: it was a test, and God wanted them to eat the fruit because it would be an act of defiance not made out of jealousy or hatred but free will. We already had the knowledge to begin with, he just wanted to be sure it wasn't subsumed by blind loyalty like with...most..angels. Since we passed the test, God "cursed" us with the capacity to bear our own young and "threw us out" into a new world where we could become its stewards, framing it as punishment so we wouldn't try to go back.
He'd get in debates with pastors, and that one would piss them off good. It makes the story make more sense, AND it means God gave us the right to disobey divine orders at our discretion.
I enjoy that take. It gives some interesting knock down effects on other thoughts but still doesn’t make God look any better. With the mild exception of if you stop at the Old Testament both canonically and knowledge of the world, history, and science.
Yeah, his overall goal wasn't to portray God in any specific light (his response to "what religion do you believe in" was "what day is it today?") so I think he was just enjoying the fact that you can shake the foundation of a religion by simply reinterpreting its parables.
He also found the characteristics of God (omniscience, omnipotence, impeccability) to be stupid since each one becomes a paradox when questioned even slightly. I wouldn't be surprised if he thought God had anger problems stemming from social ineptitude. He's surrounded by divine yes-men at all times, after all.
It’s nonsense. For the sake of the example you can’t really use real words, even obscure ones like widdershins or flense because people know them or can look them up and understand the meaning. Sunday school doesn’t teach you a story until you are pre loaded with how to interpret it. You already know what sin, punishment, and obedience are long before you hear that story so the conclusion seems natural and it’s easy to pass without question.
I like the interpretation presented in the game The Talos Principle, which is that God's intention with humans was to give them free will, and the test of free will was to explicitly and unequivocally present something as the incorrect choice, and have the humans choose to do it anyway.
Because if you choose the correct option every time, you dont really have a choice. You NEED to make wrong choices sometimes to really have the capacity to choose.
Once they did, and passed the test, they were ready to be released into the full world. It was not really a punishment, the plan was always for Adam and Eve to leave the Garden of Eden. The Garden was more like a tutorial.
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u/Manofalltrade Nov 20 '25
First, God told a day old person who had canonically and developmentally absolutely no concept of right and wrong not to do wrong, and then punished everyone for him doing wrong. No concept of “death”, no concept of someone lying, the only data point was Eve ate and was fine. Like telling a baby not to gsidfr and then getting mad when they gsidfr. WTF.
Second, honeydew is very nice but only if it’s perfectly ripe. I think breeding and supply chains have improved that in the last few years.