An idea on original sin / fallen world

[Jane_the_Bane]

Fun fact: Jews don't read the Abrahamic creation myth that way at all.
Talmudic commentary characterises the even as a "fortunate fall", like growing up and moving out of your parents' house.

As far as I'm concerned, this is basically a gradual evolution of older strata of myth, possibly linked to the environmental collapse of the first agricultural civilisation or the trauma of giving up the comparatively easy-going hunter-gatherer life in favour of a significantly more burdensome farming culture.
Mesopotamian myth describes this in terms of a culling: men became too numerous and noisy, so the gods decimated them.
Abrahamic monotheism retcons this and shifts the blame to humans (sort of).

 

[Not David]

Fun fact: Jews don't read the Abrahamic creation myth that way at all.
Talmudic commentary characterises the even as a "fortunate fall", like growing up and moving out of your parents' house.

As far as I'm concerned, this is basically a gradual evolution of older strata of myth, possibly linked to the environmental collapse of the first agricultural civilisation or the trauma of giving up the comparatively easy-going hunter-gatherer life in favour of a significantly more burdensome farming culture.
Mesopotamian myth describes this in terms of a culling: men became too numerous and noisy, so the gods decimated them.
Abrahamic monotheism retcons this and shifts the blame to humans (sort of).

Somehow St. Justin Martyr isn't believed when he said Satan was the Serpent because he was from the 2nd century yet scholars who are influenced by modernism and rationalism and lived 1900 years after Justin Martyr and in other places are reliable.

 

[timothyu]

Somehow St. Justin Martyr isn't believed when he said Satan was the Serpent because he was from the 2nd century yet scholars who are influenced by modernism and rationalism and lived 1900 years after Justin Martyr and in other places are reliable.

Irrelevant either way. The issue is not who the influencer was (the Hebrew people long believed and still do, in the Tempter as a creation of God) Besides God dealt with that perpetrator.

The real issue is what was done by Eve, putting her will before the will of God starting a long line of like beings. Is it necessary to blame something other than ourselves for our own actions? Time to start taking personal responsibility for our actions.

 

[Jane_the_Bane]

Somehow St. Justin Martyr isn't believed when he said Satan was the Serpent because he was from the 2nd century yet scholars who are influenced by modernism and rationalism and lived 1900 years after Justin Martyr and in other places are reliable.

As far as I am concerned, Christianity is to Judaism what Mormonism is to Christianity. That doesn't make Judaic cosmology a correct assessment of reality, but it does have an impact on the credibility of the younger faiths.
In short: I think Christianity misreads the Judaic scriptures on a fundamental level, as evidenced by Talmudic commentary. And the "new testament" just tries too hard retrofitting its claims to the earlier tradition. But that's a different discussion. What matters here is: neither the composers nor the original audience of the book we call Genesis read that text in terms of anti-god Satan disguising as a serpent and dooming mankind through original sin, which can only be amended by god sacrificing himself as a human avatar in order to stay true to his principles and dooming all who do not appeal to this sacrifice as a get-out-of-hell card to an eternity of torment in an Auschwitz-like afterlife. (A fate supposedly shared even by the least corrupt of souls, placing the Buddhist nun in the same place as the most depraved mass murderers.)

 

[Jane_the_Bane]

I do think Genesis records an echo of the agrarian revolution's trauma.
See, as useful as agriculture was in allowing populations to grow and giving societies the size they needed in order to create specialists, it signified a sharp decline in *individual* quality of life.
Looking at skeletons from before and after the neolithic revolution, you see vastly more traces of bad health, stunted growth and hard labor. And looking at the few remaining hunter-gatherers, you may be surprised to see that they enjoy a tremendous amount of free time, as opposed to the back-breaking work of ancient field workers.
Yet the success of agriculture was a numerical inevitability.
And so, our ancestors went from a fairly relaxed existence where the environment seemed to provide sustenance by itself as long as you didn't reproduce too much to the "painful toil" described in the Elohim's curse.

 

[Not David]

As far as I am concerned, Christianity is to Judaism what Mormonism is to Christianity. That doesn't make Judaic cosmology a correct assessment of reality, but it does have an impact on the credibility of the younger faiths.
In short: I think Christianity misreads the Judaic scriptures on a fundamental level, as evidenced by Talmudic commentary. And the "new testament" just tries too hard retrofitting its claims to the earlier tradition. But that's a different discussion. What matters here is: neither the composers nor the original audience of the book we call Genesis read that text in terms of anti-god Satan disguising as a serpent and dooming mankind through original sin, which can only be amended by god sacrificing himself as a human avatar in order to stay true to his principles and dooming all who do not appeal to this sacrifice as a get-out-of-hell card to an eternity of torment in an Auschwitz-like afterlife. (A fate supposedly shared even by the least corrupt of souls, placing the Buddhist nun in the same place as the most depraved mass murderers.)

Hell is not about an "concentration camp" place but God's love experienced by an unrepentant and proud sinner. Also most of the Talmud was made after the New Testament and even the Jewish work "Wisdom of Solomon" talks about evil coming from the devil.

 

[timothyu]

The Hebrew people had the Tempter, and a satan was an adversary, hence adversarial to the will of God. Jesus went about bringing the Kingdom of God over the will of man back into vogue.

 

[Jane_the_Bane]

Hell is not about an "concentration camp" place but God's love experienced by an unrepentant and proud sinner.

Do not pretend this is the only understanding of hell within Christendom. I'm fairly certain more than 80% of American Christians aren't even familiar with this Eastern Orthodox reading, and find other ways to justify it to themselves. The most popular versions include (but are not limited to): God does not send people to hell, they choose it for themselves by not becoming Christians" and "God chooses whom to save, but we all deserve to burn; who are we to question His judgment?"

Also most of the Talmud was made after the New Testament and even the Jewish work "Wisdom of Solomon" talks about evil coming from the devil.

Correction: the WRITTEN version was canonized in the 1st/2nd century, but the oral tradition recorded there clearly reflects significantly older layers. For example, early talmudic commentaries clearly understand the Serpent to be a literal snake, while younger portions conflate it with God's quality tester, Satan. A loyal angel in Judaism, tasked with demonstrating God's glory.
It's clear that Judaism moved in a similar direction as Christianity for a time, as the notion of not having your monotheistic god be responsible for horrible tragedies was quite tempting (and had a precedent in Zoroastrian dualism). But in the end, they realized that an evil angel made no sense at all in a setting where an all-powerful, all-knowing deity could thwart any opposition before it even begins - without interfering with "free will", too.

 

[Zoness]

Hell is not about an "concentration camp" place but God's love experienced by an unrepentant and proud sinner. Also most of the Talmud was made after the New Testament and even the Jewish work "Wisdom of Solomon" talks about evil coming from the devil.

This is definitely a minority view; in Catholic and Protestant circles hell has always been described as eternal conscious torment in a lake of fire. At least in every church I've ever been. I've only heard of your position in some Orthodox circles.

 

[timothyu]

This is definitely a minority view; in Catholic and Protestant circles hell has always been described as eternal conscious torment in a lake of fire. At least in every church I've ever been. I've only heard of your position in some Orthodox circles.

It still blows me away that 2nd death can mean eternal consciousness for those not of the Kingdom. The way to life is through Jesus. Where did these interlopers jump the queue?