I’ve seen that one meme post previously and it pushed me to rethink a little about the topic of the apple and the snake.
It’s obviously a story about becoming an adult. Just like Buddha escaped his temple to see the hungry, the sick and the dead, Adam and Eve exhausted their little isolated paradise and were curious enough to eat the apple (all blame is on woman, obviously).
And someone dropped a comparison to how it tracks with kids - the moment you say one thing on the table isn’t for them, be sure they’d take it. Then was this omnipotent, omniparent stupid, or irresponsible? Or didn’t they find a way to communicate complicated stuff to their children, like we don’t always have power in us to talk to our kids about sex and drugs? It seems like the case here. In their mind they could do so forever. And we all know how it’s bad.
For a long stretch of time god bought them all candies and toys, so their pockets seemed bottomless, but it’s so happens they aren’t. God produced this illusion around them, so they never knew what’s catching a cold is, what feeling a need is. But why it’s bad to know the truth? It sure hurts, but timely discovery makes one prepared. You know, prepared like an adult.
Let’s look at how Harry Potter was cool before we started to see a certain pattern in it’s awkward little details. Or how sunday school’s or choir’s kids looked so innocent and cute before we learnt more about religious indocrination and what track record pastors have with not abusing kids. How our one day delivery is possible due to drivers pissing in the bottles. Nestlé, Amazon, big oil, big pharma, cops, overseas operations, financial pyramids, influencers, tech visionaires, self-made billionaires, medievil knights.
It hurts to know the truth, but in the end it made us more conscious and prepared to reality. Like, we can avoid investing into dogecoin after the hype is long gone and we won’t collect anything on currency speculation.
It takes an adult to survive here. Satan in a shape of a snake was this cool aunt who fed you apple, showed you how god cared about you to defend from reality, equiped you with some actusl knowledge. They could’ve got their internal fight, but in the end, you wasn’t fit anymore to live in a lie.
Like you can’t watch and support that streamer who also doubles as a child groomer.
And the question I struggle to answer, why is it bad? Was it inescapable or god thought it is while it isn’t? Seeing it as a bad parenting issue adds some context. And I don’t feel like Satan giving an apple could become that influential if god himself wasn’t shy to share what he knows, it only became a problem because he didn’t. He built the Gardens of Eden on lies and when it became obvious, he just dropped their children into adult life miserably unpepared.
God sucks at parenting.
If I’m remembering my biblical historical lit crit correctly, the whole Eden thing was an adaptation of an existing mythology but reappropriated by a religious-political movement that was trying to consolidate power under a henotheistic theological model, as opposed to the currently existing polytheistic one.
In the original religion of the region, El was the father-god, Ashera was his wife/consort, and Yahweh, Baal, and somewhere between tween a dozen and forty others where their children. Yahweh became the tribal god of Israel, who was eventually merged with Yahweh and had Ashera as his consort. Ashera was the mother-goddess and was worshipped as the goddess of motherhood and (this is important) wisdom. One of Ashera’s holy symbols was a snake coiled around a tree or branch.
I think Ashera worship continued through about 200 CE, but it was steadily crushed and was in fact specifically called out a couple of times in existent writings as they moved from explicit henotheism to “monotheism,” with the scare quotes to indicate that having things like angels and spirits and demigods and such are not exactly monotheistic.
In any case, the “fall from paradise” is a pan cultural myth that continues to the present day with idealizations of prehistorical societies that were destroyed by agriculture and the rise of civilization (see Graeber’s extensive work on this). This was just a politicized version of that.
Eh, the first eleven chapters might have been appended to the rest of the Torah, but it either dates to Hellenistic Greece at 4th century BCE or Persian- 6th century BCE.
Keep in mind, the first creation story (“in the beginning…”…”on the first day…”) it was almost certainly propaganda, finalized and tweaked during the Hellenistic period.
How was it propaganda? The firm of it was cloned from (iirc) Babylonian myths, except one upping like a school boy’s supposed dad. “Oh yeah? Well our god is so strong… not only did he create the whole universe and everything in it… he did it alone…. and he’s sooooo powerful, he did it in six days and napped on the last!”
National/tribal religions are weird like that.