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Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

Scripture are clear. Sin and death entered this world through Adam, and he was thus to blame for original sin.

Yet God rewarded Adam with dominion over Eve even though Eve was not responsible for sin and death entering the world. Gen3:16 and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

This shows God continuing the policy of punishing the innocent instead of the guilty that is shown in scriptures. 1Peter 1:20 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.

God seems to be rewarding Adam for sin while punishing Eve for the events in Eden even though she was innocent of sin as she did not have any evil intent and was deceived by Satan, a force that she could not possibly resist thanks to God giving Satan the power to deceive the whole world after God put Satan in Eden with Eve.

If making man ruler over women that was an error, it would help explain the 5,000 years of war we have had to endure with undeserving men as rulers.

Gnostic Christianity, a Universalist belief system, believes in full equality for all souls. Christianity obviously does not believe in equality if it preaches that men are to perpetually enjoy ruling over women. Not to mention the inequality of gays.

Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve and thus punishing the innocent instead of the guilty?

Regards
DL
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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I'd have to assume that the attitudes toward women reflected in God's actions in the Bible came from the society that pre-existed the making of the scriptures. That's the naturalistic explanation for what gods do and for gods themselves--people created it all. I think I wouldn't therefore place so much importance on the existence of this Christian myth to explain why women have often been treated poorly. There perhaps don't exist similar myths in other religious scriptures to justify the second-class status of women, but we know that religions worldwide have usually not been kind to women. I would guess that women do a bit better in Christian cultures, in fact. I'm afraid I'd have to put down the treatment of women as one of the failures of religion in general, with improvements in women's lives coming not because of religion, but in spite of it.
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Sociologically speaking, you are right on the mark.

I suggest that a lot of what you put was not in the Jewish tradition before Christianity came along to turn Eden from man's elevation to his fall.

For that opinion I turn to how women were treated (with great respect and equality) in Egypt which I think is where Judaism pulled a lot of their myths, as well as Sumer but I have no information from them as to how they treated women.

To give my two typing fingers a break, please accept the following links that bolster my view of how Jews treated women and suggest that it was the Christian ideology more than the Jewish one that created the misogyny that we know Christianity embraced.

http://www.jewfaq.org/women.htm

The next speaks to the vilification of women and the serpent in a non-existing fall.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/ ... -theodicy/

‘Instead of the Fall of man (in the sense of humanity as a whole), Judaism preaches the Rise of man: and instead of Original Sin, it stresses Original Virtue, the beneficent hereditary influence of righteous ancestors upon their descendants’

I believe that Christianity change the elevation of man idea to a fall so as to vilify both women and the serpent of Eden.

There was a plethora of serpent mystery religions in that day and Christianity wanted to vilify them as well as put women in their (place).

Key to why I think as I do is the verse in Gen3:22 And the LORD God said: 'Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil;

How Christianity sold the notion that gaining a moral sense for mankind was evil I cannot fathom. Perhaps you can. If so, please share your opinion.

Regards
DL
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Well, what I have to say about the topic isn't to argue against your point of view, but just to indicate the gaps that exist for me. I'd have to fill in the gaps before I could argue one way or the other. The information about the status of women in Jewish society is interesting and impressive in some regards. It describes a sharp and specific division in gender roles that wouldn't seem to exist in Christianity. The question is whether the "special" roles for women amount to a kind of separate-but-equal status for them. I didn't note that a significant religious or political role was given to them, though. Today, it may be different religiously, but this would be in the progressive brand of Judaism. Politically, women are greatly under-represented in Israel, as they are just about everywhere else. It remains my view that Judaism was (and is) very patriarchal and that the OT contains more passages detailing the subjugation of women than does the NT. I don't automatically equate patriarchy with misogyny, but patriarchy will shift the power balance to the males.

I wasn't able to find a summary of the status of women under the early church that would contrast with the role that Jewish women had. I did find mention of the large numbers of women who flocked to Christianity early on; maybe even a majority of the congregation was women. If the early church was misogynistic, it would be surprising to see the faith become so popular among women. Paul, of course, mentions women in his salutations to the congregations.

Yes, women got a bad rap in Christian countries, and it has taken a long time for them to reach anything near equality. As a partisan of no religion, I have to view the matter relativistically, though. Have women fared worse where Christianity has been dominant, compared to where other world religions have been? My provisional answer is "no."
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Gnostic Bishop wrote:Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?
The question implies an untrue concept of God as personal entity. The underlying issue for the question is why patriarchal monotheism conquered matrifocal nature worship in the Ancient Middle East. The Old Testament Book of Judges Chapter 18 provides an excellent answer to this question, showing that communities who tried to keep to old 'Golden Age' ideals of peace and justice got obliterated by soldiers with swords. The symbolic meaning of the rule of Adam over Eve is that Israel’s national security required a regimented hierarchical male dominated religion.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Scripture are clear. Sin and death entered this world through Adam, and he was thus to blame for original sin.
Is it really that clear? Genesis 3:6 says “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit of it, and ate; and she gave some to her husband with her, and he ate.” The fall from grace into corruption is therefore mythologised as due to the woman tempting man. Paul says in Romans 5:12 “sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin” but the ideology was that Adam’s fall was prompted by Eve accepting the advice of the snake.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Yet God rewarded Adam with dominion over Eve even though Eve was not responsible for sin and death entering the world. Gen3:16 and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
That is a wrong reading. You seem to be taking Paul’s summary at Romans as a way to ignore the very broad Judeo-Christian ideology that justifies female subordination by reference to the claimed action of Eve in offering Adam the forbidden fruit.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: This shows God continuing the policy of punishing the innocent instead of the guilty that is shown in scriptures.
Punishment of the innocent is a consequence of the fall from grace. It is not mean to be just, but rather a consequence of the alienation of humanity from nature and God.
Gnostic Bishop wrote:1Peter 1:20 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.
This Biblical vision of the pre-existent Christ as eternal Logos is presented in the Bible as showing the way to eventually end the punishment of the innocent through the rule of love. I am discussing these themes at the ex-christian discussion forum with Tat Tvam Asi, examining the possibility of a scientific astronomical basis for these myths.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: God seems to be rewarding Adam for sin while punishing Eve for the events in Eden even though she was innocent of sin as she did not have any evil intent and was deceived by Satan, a force that she could not possibly resist thanks to God giving Satan the power to deceive the whole world after God put Satan in Eden with Eve.
Where do you get that God rewards Adam? He doesn’t. The expulsion from Paradise replaces a life of leisure and abundance with a life of toil and scarcity. That is not a reward. The patriarchal religion is a result of the fall, as the only way to ensure social unity and security in a world of increasing conflict.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: If making man ruler over women that was an error, it would help explain the 5,000 years of war we have had to endure with undeserving men as rulers.
The logic behind this suggestion does not make sense. God setting men above women is a myth/paradigm which was successful in Israel and elsewhere because the alternative myth/paradigm of gender equality was unworkable. The communities who tried to hold to gender equality got destroyed by rapacious armies. The Bible contains the ideas of the victors. The male superiority theory only survived because it was a more adaptive ideology in evolutionary terms, suited to the social environment of war. The authors of this theory attributed it to God to give it extra weight, but it makes no sense to accept that false metaphysics of God as a personal intentional entity. God is better explained as a psychological projection of human desires.

Ideas about God evolve memetically by cumulative adaptation to selective pressures. A prevailing mythological paradigm can survive only as long as it functions better than alternatives. Myths do not come from on high from transcendental divine revelation, even though part of their success is the claim that they do come from God. When enough people stop believing the myth it collapses. That process is still underway with the myth of Adam and Eve.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Gnostic Christianity, a Universalist belief system, believes in full equality for all souls. Christianity obviously does not believe in equality if it preaches that men are to perpetually enjoy ruling over women. Not to mention the inequality of gays.
The whole Christian dogma of patriarchy is a myth that reflects the social needs of the Iron Age. As we now transition into a new age, whether you want to call it the information age, the rising bronze age or the Age of Aquarius, Christianity will only survive by reforming to accept gender equality. But that is far from simple, given the intense connection between patriarchy and military ideas of national security from the days of Christian and Jewish origins.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve and thus punishing the innocent instead of the guilty?
Regards DL
My reading of that question begins with the scientific hypothesis that the slow process of natural climate change provides the durable stable context for genetic evolution of life on earth. This climate process is driven by orbital patterns. The very interesting thing in support of this hypothesis is the observation that a natural repeating orbital period equates to the annual season of planetary fall, seen in purely scientific objective empirical measurement. This orbital cycle correlates exactly with the 6000 year long period that Christian theology interprets as the fall from grace. So the memetics of human cultural evolution is nested inside the genetics which is nested inside the astronomy. God, or Nature, sits outside this whole millennial change process as the rules of natural order in the cosmos.

Blaming God for the fall is equivalent to blaming God for the cold dark harsh barren weather that recurs every winter in temperate latitudes. The fall season is part of nature like night follows day, both at the annual level that we are familiar with and also at the longer framework of precession as seen in glacial data. The challenge of surviving winter is enabled by knowledge that spring and summer are coming back.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Sun Oct 15, 2017 5:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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DWill wrote:I'd have to assume that the attitudes toward women reflected in God's actions in the Bible came from the society that pre-existed the making of the scriptures. That's the naturalistic explanation for what gods do and for gods themselves--people created it all. I think I wouldn't therefore place so much importance on the existence of this Christian myth to explain why women have often been treated poorly. There perhaps don't exist similar myths in other religious scriptures to justify the second-class status of women, but we know that religions worldwide have usually not been kind to women. I would guess that women do a bit better in Christian cultures, in fact. I'm afraid I'd have to put down the treatment of women as one of the failures of religion in general, with improvements in women's lives coming not because of religion, but in spite of it.
Quite true to an extent.

Christianity was plagiarized or came out of Jewish traditions which came out of Sumer and Egypt.

From what I have read, both the Egyptians and Jews gave near equality to women even that far back in history. Some Pharaohs were even women.

Christianity institutionalized women as second class citizens from Eden on up.

Strange when they say that God creates all souls, to think that all souls are not equal.

I am pleased that my Gnostic Christian tradition gives full equality to all souls.

Regards
DL
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Robert Tulip wrote:
Gnostic Bishop wrote:Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?
The question implies an untrue concept of God as personal entity.


All Gods are personal entities as they can only exist in the minds of people. We all create our Gods and they are thus all personal to us.
The underlying issue for the question is why patriarchal monotheism conquered matrifocal nature worship in the Ancient Middle East.


Basically, yes.
The Old Testament Book of Judges Chapter 18 provides an excellent answer to this question, showing that communities who tried to keep to old 'Golden Age' ideals of peace and justice got obliterated by soldiers with swords.
True, but a nation does not have to make second class citizens of their women to follow natural law that makes men the protectors of women and children.

The Jews, in their moral of the story, venerated Eve and the serpent for creating man's elevation in Eden. The Christian fall denigrated both and made women second class instead of the great teacher.
The symbolic meaning of the rule of Adam over Eve is that Israel’s national security required a regimented hierarchical male dominated religion.
Yet their religion was plagiarized from Sumer and Egypt. Egypt even had female Pharaoh's so to suggest that Jews needed to have a man leading them is counterintuitive.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Scripture are clear. Sin and death entered this world through Adam, and he was thus to blame for original sin.
Is it really that clear? Genesis 3:6 says “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit of it, and ate; and she gave some to her husband with her, and he ate.” The fall from grace into corruption is therefore mythologised as due to the woman tempting man.
More like ordered Adam since neither sais a word, but that aside.
Paul says in Romans 5:12 “sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin” but the ideology was that Adam’s fall was prompted by Eve accepting the advice of the snake.
I agree with that last part but if we are to follow the myth, Eve had no choice thanks to God's own power of deception running through the serpent/Satan, who was given the power to deceive the whole world. That is why scriptures say that she was deceived while saying Adam sinned.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Yet God rewarded Adam with dominion over Eve even though Eve was not responsible for sin and death entering the world. Gen3:16 and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
That is a wrong reading. You seem to be taking Paul’s summary at Romans as a way to ignore the very broad Judeo-Christian ideology that justifies female subordination by reference to the claimed action of Eve in offering Adam the forbidden fruit.
The Judeo part was to put women as equal to man and not subordinate to men. Their ideology came out of Egypt where some of the Pharaohs were women. Jews also saw Eden, not as a fall but as an elevation for mankind. Christians did not.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: This shows God continuing the policy of punishing the innocent instead of the guilty that is shown in scriptures.
Punishment of the innocent is a consequence of the fall from grace. It is not mean to be just, but rather a consequence of the alienation of humanity from nature and God.
Again, the Jews saw an elevation for man, not a fall. Making women second class is not natural as men naturally place women and children above us.
Gnostic Bishop wrote:1Peter 1:20 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.
This Biblical vision of the pre-existent Christ as eternal Logos is presented in the Bible as showing the way to eventually end the punishment of the innocent through the rule of love. I am discussing these themes at the ex-christian discussion forum with Tat Tvam Asi, examining the possibility of a scientific astronomical basis for these myths.
The rule of love would be to forgive and not condemn. To shift the blame to an innocent man is not kosher.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: God seems to be rewarding Adam for sin while punishing Eve for the events in Eden even though she was innocent of sin as she did not have any evil intent and was deceived by Satan, a force that she could not possibly resist thanks to God giving Satan the power to deceive the whole world after God put Satan in Eden with Eve.
Where do you get that God rewards Adam? He doesn’t.
Buddy, would you rather be the ruler or the one ruled?

I think being the one ruled is the less likely choice you will make, that makes being a ruler a reward.

The expulsion from Paradise replaces a life of leisure and abundance with a life of toil and scarcity.


Indeed, but it also set mankind up as thinking creatures instead of creatures that had their eyes closed to all knowledge and a moral sense.

A & E rightly chose to be thinking and intelligent creatures instead of being as bright as bricks.
That is not a reward.
Yes it is if you see what I put above. Think of Eden as the coming of age yarn that is was meant to be.
The patriarchal religion is a result of the fall, as the only way to ensure social unity and security in a world of increasing conflict.
Women need not be subjugated to accomplish that goal. Natural law takes care of it.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: If making man ruler over women that was an error, it would help explain the 5,000 years of war we have had to endure with undeserving men as rulers.
The logic behind this suggestion does not make sense. God setting men above women is a myth/paradigm which was successful in Israel and elsewhere because the alternative myth/paradigm of gender equality was unworkable.
It worked in Egypt.
The communities who tried to hold to gender equality got destroyed by rapacious armies.
Perhaps, but not because of gender equality.
The Bible contains the ideas of the victors. The male superiority theory only survived because it was a more adaptive ideology in evolutionary terms, suited to the social environment of war.
All other creatures are at war with the environment, so to speak, yet they do not subjugate their females. They put them above, not below the males position.
The authors of this theory attributed it to God to give it extra weight, but it makes no sense to accept that false metaphysics of God as a personal intentional entity. God is better explained as a psychological projection of human desires.


True but the scriptures and the Christian interpretations are going against natural law and male psychology that naturally put women and children and their needs ahead of males.
Ideas about God evolve memetically by cumulative adaptation to selective pressures. A prevailing mythological paradigm can survive only as long as it functions better than alternatives. Myths do not come from on high from transcendental divine revelation, even though part of their success is the claim that they do come from God. When enough people stop believing the myth it collapses. That process is still underway with the myth of Adam and Eve.
And we know that that does not work if the happiness of all is considered.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Gnostic Christianity, a Universalist belief system, believes in full equality for all souls. Christianity obviously does not believe in equality if it preaches that men are to perpetually enjoy ruling over women. Not to mention the inequality of gays.
The whole Christian dogma of patriarchy is a myth that reflects the social needs of the Iron Age. As we now transition into a new age, whether you want to call it the information age, the rising bronze age or the Age of Aquarius, Christianity will only survive by reforming to accept gender equality. But that is far from simple, given the intense connection between patriarchy and military ideas of national security from the days of Christian and Jewish origins.
Not so hard if men recognize that the strong serve the weak and it is not to the weak to serve the strong.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve and thus punishing the innocent instead of the guilty?
Regards DL
My reading of that question begins with the scientific hypothesis that the slow process of natural climate change provides the durable stable context for genetic evolution of life on earth. This climate process is driven by orbital patterns. The very interesting thing in support of this hypothesis is the observation that a natural repeating orbital period equates to the annual season of planetary fall, seen in purely scientific objective empirical measurement. This orbital cycle correlates exactly with the 6000 year long period that Christian theology interprets as the fall from grace. So the memetics of human cultural evolution is nested inside the genetics which is nested inside the astronomy. God, or Nature, sits outside this whole millennial change process as the rules of natural order in the cosmos.
Weather always changes from good to bad but human psychology does not.
Blaming God for the fall is equivalent to blaming God for the cold dark harsh barren weather that recurs every winter in temperate latitudes. The fall season is part of nature like night follows day, both at the annual level that we are familiar with and also at the longer framework of precession as seen in glacial data. The challenge of surviving winter is enabled by knowledge that spring and summer are coming back.
[/quote]

I do not blame some supernatural God directly but do blame the Gods that Christians hold in their minds and give power and respect to and follow on a path that goes against natural law.

Christianity is in error and not some fictional God, even though I did use God in the O.P.to ask the question.

Regards
DL
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Gnostic Bishop wrote:All Gods are personal entities as they can only exist in the minds of people. We all create our Gods and they are thus all personal to us.
Imagination about Gods is social. A view that is not shared is basically irrelevant to religion and myth, since the stories that give meaning to culture emerge from dialogue. A merely personal vision does not reflect the testing of memes that occurs in society.

But in any case, a subjective view about God is different from the traditional idea that God is personal. The traditional myth is that God is a single intentional intelligence, beyond the universe, able to make decisions like a person. I think that concept of God is wrong, as religious phenomena are far better explained on the hypothesis that they are caused by factors in our universe. It is more productive and accurate to consider all language about God as metaphor for how the stable order of the universe enables human flourishing. Claiming that religion has insights of transcendental revelation that are not available to reason is a dead end.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: A nation does not have to make second class citizens of their women to follow natural law that makes men the protectors of women and children.
You are over-simplifying the history here. The fact was, in the violent context of the Holy Land in the Iron Age, any community that tried to practice gender equality would be conquered and destroyed. The victory went to the cultures that imposed strict gender segmentation and subordination of women. It is wrong to argue that because the need for inequality no longer applies, therefore it could have been otherwise in the past.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: The Jews, in their moral of the story, venerated Eve and the serpent for creating man's elevation in Eden. The Christian fall denigrated both and made women second class instead of the great teacher.
The Christian doctrine of the fall expands on Genesis, a Jewish book. You can’t elevate Judaism above Christianity in that way. Looking at Jewish views on the Fall, the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/artic ... all-of-man illustrates extensive use of the concept of the fall among Jewish authors such as Philo and Esdras since ancient times.

Wikipedia includes the unsourced and unsupported statement that “Judaism does not have a concept of "the fall"”. This wiki statement only seems to reflect how Augustinian theology elaborated the simple idea of fall into the complex dogma of original sin.

Another good summary of Jewish views is at http://thetorah.com/the-immortal-myth-of-adam-and-eve/ which discusses the full blown investigation of the Eden story in the Rabbinic period. I have not found discussion of your claim about venerating the snake, which looks quite esoteric, as referenced in Numbers and John 3.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: [Judaism] was plagiarized from Sumer and Egypt.
“Plagiarised” is an incorrect and loaded term for how Judaism evolved. Mythic memes take a very long time to evolve in religion. It is entirely possible that conceptual links such as between Noah and Gilgamesh or between Jesus and Horus were widely understood in earlier times but this gnosis was later suppressed. The original borrowing may have been acknowledged but later texts may have censored the connection.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Egypt even had female Pharaoh's so to suggest that Jews needed to have a man leading them is counterintuitive.
The intuitive basis for male leadership can be seen in the debates in the Old Testament in books such as Judges and Samuel. The harsh military environment with constant risk of invasion created the need for kings, even while allowing prominent capable women judges such as Deborah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah to have strategic influence. But women did not lead armies in the ancient world, so the link between kingship and military leadership meant women could not rule except indirectly.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: to follow the myth, Eve had no choice thanks to God's own power of deception running through the serpent/Satan, who was given the power to deceive the whole world.
That is a fatalistic reading. Christian theology has generally held that the fall from grace resulted from the free will of the choices made by Adam and Eve. I personally tend to a somewhat fatalistic reading of this myth, seeing the fall as metaphor for how human history corresponds to the broad underlying millennial drivers of climate change.

This millennial natural structure of terrestrial time is similar to how we get sleepy at night, or how trees lose their leaves in the fall. We can resist the natural genetic impulse for a while but in the normal course we sleep on a regular basis.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: The Judeo part was to put women as equal to man and not subordinate to men. Their ideology came out of Egypt where some of the Pharaohs were women. Jews also saw Eden, not as a fall but as an elevation for mankind. Christians did not.
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Continuing on my previous response, I find this a very interesting topic because deconstructing Biblical Christianity seems to me central to explaining how religion can engage with the orderly structures of space and time. Looking at why the Adam and Eve story proved so durable and popular requires finding some functional reason for its success, not just condemning the surface myths.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: the Jews saw an elevation for man, not a fall. Making women second class is not natural as men naturally place women and children above us.
Where do you get the story of Eden as elevation? It is true that there are two conflicting myths of history, the myth of fall from grace and the myth of progress through technology. The fall myth says things are getting worse while the progress myth says things are getting better. But they can be reconciled if technology is seen as a way to cope with spiritual depravity.

The problem with seeing progress as a saviour is that without any concept of faith people can degenerate into an iPhone matrix plugged in world where they are unable to communicate in person, and will ignore the big problems of the planet, leading to catastrophic collapse.

The idea of Eden as elevation reminds me of the myth of progress, but I have never heard of Eden as elevation.
Gnostic Bishop wrote:The rule of love would be to forgive and not condemn. To shift the blame to an innocent man is not kosher.
The tradition of the scapegoat, the innocent who is condemned to atone for the sins of the community, comes from Judaism and is entirely kosher, from Leviticus 16:8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat.

Jesus is understood as the innocent scapegoat who takes on the sins of the world in order to save the world. My view on that is that the messianic myth involved imagining Jesus as the presence of the Golden Age in the midst of the Iron Age, as perfect knowledge confronting ignorant evil. His pure integrity and love meant he overcame the effort of evil to destroy him through the resurrection.

Total depravity means that humans seek to destroy what is most important, and also that we invent comforting stories that explain this core myth.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: being the one ruled is the less likely choice you will make, that makes being a ruler a reward.
You would recall the description of the fall at Genesis 3:17-19, where God says to Adam “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground.”

It is very clear that men and women share in the suffering of the expulsion from Paradise. The domination of women by men does not mean men don't suffer.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: [The expulsion from Paradise] set mankind up as thinking creatures instead of creatures that had their eyes closed to all knowledge and a moral sense. A & E rightly chose to be thinking and intelligent creatures instead of being as bright as bricks. Think of Eden as the coming of age yarn that is was meant to be.
I read it differently. We should set the Genesis mythology against the framework of cultural evolution. The primary message is the shift from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. That involves the rise of settled agriculture, private property, servitude, classes, armies and towns. Essentially, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural production involved ability to feed a bigger population at a lower quality of life.

That big social shift was the theme of Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe which we had as a recent booktalk non-fiction selection. American Indians had a higher quality of life than the European invaders of the New World but were defeated. due to the productivity that comes with metal, writing and cereal agriculture.

This critique of agricultural settlement translates directly into sweat of the brow as the key message of the fall from grace into corruption, involving property as the foundation of social inequality. That does not make property inherently bad as Marx argued, but rather a key to productivity at the cost of happiness.

I don’t at all accept your implication that before the fall humans were ‘bright as bricks’ and knowledge suddenly emerged with Adam and Eve. The whole story is far more subtle and complex, perhaps including knowledge of good and evil as class consciousness.

We should also recall that the Bible equates the fall with the separation from Yggdrasil the tree of life, which stood in Eden and only returns to Earth with the descent of the new Jerusalem in the Apocalypse.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Women need not be subjugated to accomplish that goal [social unity and security in a world of increasing conflict]. Natural law takes care of it.
I don’t think you are trying to get a realistic picture of what was possible in ancient Israel. As the geographical meeting place of Asia, Africa and Europe, Israel has long naturally been a place of severe conflict over land where only the most ruthless could win.

Part of that ruthless attitude included violent suppression of women by men. The Bible’s explicit attack on the egalitarian religions of goddess worship appears to be a direct result of this military security doctrine, that those who accepted gender equality would be conquered. The traditional church has retained that patriarchal monotheist attitude, but it is now broadly questioned as unethical.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: If making man ruler over women that was an error, it would help explain the 5,000 years of war we have had to endure with undeserving men as rulers.
The type of hypothetical alternative history that you are suggesting here may be an interesting thought exercise, but it can be argued that without the culture of war, the world would not have experienced the rise of technology, and we would still be in the stone age. Now some people might find that an attractive scenario. However, calling all progress driven by male dominated culture a mistake is quite a challenging critique.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: [gender equality] worked in Egypt.
No it didn’t. Egypt was conquered by Greece and Rome, and its hieroglyphic civilization was obliterated. The point is that gender equality only works until men come with swords and enslave you.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: The scriptures and the Christian interpretations are going against natural law and male psychology that naturally put women and children and their needs ahead of males.
Ideas about God evolve memetically by cumulative adaptation to selective pressures. A prevailing mythological paradigm can survive only as long as it functions better than alternatives. Myths do not come from on high, from transcendental divine revelation, even though part of their success is the claim that they come from God. When enough people stop believing the myth it collapses. That process of collapse is still underway with the myth of Adam and Eve.
Gnostic Bishop wrote:Not so hard if men recognize that the strong serve the weak and it is not to the weak to serve the strong.
But that is one of the hardest and most complex moral lessons imaginable! By and large, the strong became powerful by rejecting the values of the weak, by using discipline, talent, organisation and contacts to achieve results in the world. To turn that around and say all that achievement is immoral because real strength is service is a Christian view that most people find incomprehensible.
The way I look at it is that reconciliation between the strong and the weak is a two way street. There is no reconciliation in just transferring wealth to the poor, because wealth transfer creates dependency and stagnation and corruption. What is needed is for the poor to be educated in values that will enable them to make the most of their lives, and that is undermined by redistribution that fails to provide any incentive for improvement.
To illustrate the complexity of development, consider the impact of teaching people how to fish, as the ‘teach a man to fish’ saying goes. The trouble is teaching to fish can still create dependency by ignoring people's own methods and knowledge, and by failing to address all the systemic issues affecting their livelihood. In a fishing community the constraints can include finance, trade, marketing, culture, management, storage, crime, tax, health, literacy, etc. Teaching people to fish is only a very small part of the story of achieving sustainable economic development.
The connection to the Adam and Eve story is that the Biblical tradition is that men should protect and cherish women, while women serving men and caring for children. That segmented mentality based on gender stereotypes of physical strength and weakness is not in step with modern culture and economy, and yet it is deeply entwined with so many cultural assumptions that disentangling it is complex.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: Weather always changes from good to bad but human psychology does not.
Weather changes on an overall annual pattern from good to bad in fall and from bad to good in spring. Human psychology follows this seasonal affective pattern with increased sadness in winter and happiness in summer.

This annual pattern is also plausibly present within the long term climate pattern, whereby we are now at a bottom point, like the winter solstice, and will ascend to a top point, like the summer solstice, over the next ten thousand years. That framework puts the Adam and Eve story, conventionally dated at 4004 BC, precisely at the September equinox, the beginning of fall from summer to winter, in terms of the date of perihelion, the main orbital driver, which crossed the September equinox around 4000 BC.
Gnostic Bishop wrote: I do not blame some supernatural God directly but do blame the Gods that Christians hold in their minds and give power and respect to and follow on a path that goes against natural law. Christianity is in error and not some fictional God, even though I did use God in the O.P.to ask the question. Regards DL
Religion is a functional story of the meaning of life. The fantasy of a supernatural God used to be generally functional, and is now only functional at the sectarian level, not for the broad secular society. Making religion functional today requires, as you suggest, a Gnostic path of natural law.

So, in disentangling the wheat and the weeds in Christian tradition, the task is to separate the original coherent vision from the corrupted popular degradation. The literal supernatural belief can be burnt as weeds, together with the obsolete social values, while what remains as wheat is the background Gnostic philosophy.
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Re: Did God err in making Adam ruler over Eve?

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Robert Tulip wrote:
And on your comment about Eden, Christians and Jews do not regard Eden as a fall, but see the human free choice to disobey God as the basis of the fall myth.
[/quote][/quote]

To disobey a God who wants to keep us as bright as bricks is a good idea. Right?

Always good to read your thoughts buddy. I did want to speak to this one.

"Christian theology has generally held that the fall from grace resulted from the free will of the choices made by Adam and Eve."

Can you make a free choice without knowing if what you are choosing from is good or evil?

It might be free but it would not be a real thought out choice as without knowing the variables, one could not know what to desire.

You might have the time to listen to this Rabbi speak to this notion, which destroys the notion of a free will since the desire would not be there to form the choice.

The pertinent part starts at about the 27 min. mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAJkiUHizhk

I will have a look at your links and comment shortly.

Regards
DL
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