I think it’s a misread to say it gave us evil. The garden is portrayed as being a paradise with a tree of knowledge. The man and the women, as they self-identified themselves to be, were both allowed agency to be themselves and be blessed without the burden of knowledge, so long as they did not eat the forbidden fruit. Both the man and the woman independently made the conscious decision to break the rule given to them to not eat the fruit of knowledge. The actual sin was both the man and woman breaking their covenant with God, through the eating of the fruit. My take on this is that story is meant to show that God can help you and will help you, but if you choose to go against his will you have the face the consequences of that decision on your own. However, you can still seek forgiveness for your decisions and even be forgiven, but this doesn’t magically put everything back to the way things were before.
The story is more or less a cultural device to explain good and evil from the perspective of the early Israelite society. The story itself is rippled throughout the Bible in this way: God gives instructions, the people follow the instructions at first but then grow complacent, bad things happen because people stop following God’s instructions, and then one of the leaders of the tribe of Israel steps in to help get people back on the right path of following God’s instructions.
I’ll add that functionally Genesis is three serparate creation stories that were pulled into one book. Culturally, the early Israelites borrowed some of the elements of other creation stories of their time seen in other cultures such as the Babylonians. The first creation story is the seven days, the second is what we know as the story Adam and Eve, and the third was the story of the great flood.
A major problem I’ve always had with that story is the fact that it is predicated on the fact that Adam and Eve acted disobediently by eating of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. But what is disobedience? Is disobedience a form of evil? To disobey God would be evil if it was done with knowledge, correct? How could Adam and Eve have possibly known that what they were doing was evil if they had no knowledge of such? Why would God set the situation up to necessitate that Adam and Eve would eventually disobey his wishes if they had no knowledge of good and evil, and therefore no knowledge of how their actions would have an impact or how their actions would be considered wrong. If a 2 year old disobeys their parents it’s easy to brush off their behavior as just being ignorant, and Adam and Eve are effectively like the cosmic 2-year-old, totally incapable of understanding consequences, or righteousness, or disobedience. Fundamentally, the God that created the Garden of Eden must be evil because what he did is akin to me putting an infant in a room with a loaded bear trap and telling them not to touch it. They don’t understand the consequences, nor do they really understand what commands mean. Is it really the baby’s fault for getting caught in a bear trap if I am the one with superior agency and knowledge and I was the one that set the whole thing up in the first place? Who is really the evil one here?
God is often referred to as the Father, and if he is truly a father I would say that he fails miserably in that duty by the very fact that he put his children directly In harm’s way. Yes, it is the responsibility of the parent to put obstacles in the way of their children so that they can grow, but at the same time it is also the responsibility to protect them from grievous harm, and clearly he didn’t do this according to Genesis.
“What if you gave them free will AND ALSO gave them the knowledge of the true nature of existence, rather than relying on them figuring everything out via very obviously man-made religions?”
Did god not have the power to give us free will without also giving us evil?
Had the power but opted not to: god is himself some part evil
Didn’t have the power, did the best he could with the tools he had: god is not omnipotent.
Pick one.
Life isn’t black and white. Also, Psalm 82: 6 I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
7 But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. (Lucifer, for example)
I think it’s a misread to say it gave us evil. The garden is portrayed as being a paradise with a tree of knowledge. The man and the women, as they self-identified themselves to be, were both allowed agency to be themselves and be blessed without the burden of knowledge, so long as they did not eat the forbidden fruit. Both the man and the woman independently made the conscious decision to break the rule given to them to not eat the fruit of knowledge. The actual sin was both the man and woman breaking their covenant with God, through the eating of the fruit. My take on this is that story is meant to show that God can help you and will help you, but if you choose to go against his will you have the face the consequences of that decision on your own. However, you can still seek forgiveness for your decisions and even be forgiven, but this doesn’t magically put everything back to the way things were before.
The story is more or less a cultural device to explain good and evil from the perspective of the early Israelite society. The story itself is rippled throughout the Bible in this way: God gives instructions, the people follow the instructions at first but then grow complacent, bad things happen because people stop following God’s instructions, and then one of the leaders of the tribe of Israel steps in to help get people back on the right path of following God’s instructions.
I’ll add that functionally Genesis is three serparate creation stories that were pulled into one book. Culturally, the early Israelites borrowed some of the elements of other creation stories of their time seen in other cultures such as the Babylonians. The first creation story is the seven days, the second is what we know as the story Adam and Eve, and the third was the story of the great flood.
A major problem I’ve always had with that story is the fact that it is predicated on the fact that Adam and Eve acted disobediently by eating of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. But what is disobedience? Is disobedience a form of evil? To disobey God would be evil if it was done with knowledge, correct? How could Adam and Eve have possibly known that what they were doing was evil if they had no knowledge of such? Why would God set the situation up to necessitate that Adam and Eve would eventually disobey his wishes if they had no knowledge of good and evil, and therefore no knowledge of how their actions would have an impact or how their actions would be considered wrong. If a 2 year old disobeys their parents it’s easy to brush off their behavior as just being ignorant, and Adam and Eve are effectively like the cosmic 2-year-old, totally incapable of understanding consequences, or righteousness, or disobedience. Fundamentally, the God that created the Garden of Eden must be evil because what he did is akin to me putting an infant in a room with a loaded bear trap and telling them not to touch it. They don’t understand the consequences, nor do they really understand what commands mean. Is it really the baby’s fault for getting caught in a bear trap if I am the one with superior agency and knowledge and I was the one that set the whole thing up in the first place? Who is really the evil one here?
God is often referred to as the Father, and if he is truly a father I would say that he fails miserably in that duty by the very fact that he put his children directly In harm’s way. Yes, it is the responsibility of the parent to put obstacles in the way of their children so that they can grow, but at the same time it is also the responsibility to protect them from grievous harm, and clearly he didn’t do this according to Genesis.
And don’t forget the really fun part, where you can actually still see the three flood stories smashed into one if you look at the sentences.
Going by the Bible, it’s both. He acted with malice and proved himself to not be omnipotent many times.
Jod introduced the idea of freewill to the board.
Lucifer said “That’s a bad idea, chief. Free will would ruin them.”
Jod cast him out.
Humans fucked everything up.
Jod sent his CTO, Jesus to try and fix it. It went poorly.
Lucifer said " I told you so"
“What if you gave them free will AND ALSO gave them the knowledge of the true nature of existence, rather than relying on them figuring everything out via very obviously man-made religions?”
“Naw.”