vegetariantaxidermy wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:29 am
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 5:17 am
VVilliam wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 2:17 am
Adam or Eve?
The 'curse' in the
Adam and Eve story is not originally literal. It was a means of passing on the general collective ideas from all cultures regarding why we as humans were distinctly intelligent enough over all other parts of nature yet appear unable to solve the question,
why do we require suffering to live?.
"Adam" represents ANY first person, the '
atomic' being who seems to think differently to other animals, and "Eve" refers to all other people that follow. [And why 'eve-' terms are used expressively to refer to infinite concepts, like 'ever'. The terms,
odd and
even also relate.
The curse was about becoming intelligent (as the 'gods'). When we are all young we want to grow up quick thinking that being an adult would be ideal. But the curse is discovering that once you KNOW something, such as the 'secrets of the universe', you can no longer be privileged to be naive and are forced to recognize that struggle and death are not even something that the 'gods' (where they could exist) could prevent. The curse is the loss of our naivety and the recognizition of life not being so 'fair' as our minds as children would normally default to: that we cannot live for
ever. [Thus
evening brings death in the comparative way of our sun each day, an in
evitible reality.]
Note that the term, 'evil' has the root of Eve there too! So this is why the mistaken interpretation that the cartoon representing the concept of Eve, was necessarily relevant to sex or to individual persons.
What a load of convoluted nonsense. And 'evil' does not have the same root as 'Eve'.
"Evil" is from "Eve" + "el" and refers to "after thee", where 'thee' was a prepostion for "Adam", which in turn derives from the same term that gives us "Autumn" (intentional respelling to hide the connection), for "the fall". And in context to the Adam and Eve story, The intentional meaning of "evil" in
English derived from a derogatory interpretation of Eve as the CAUSE of the fall. That "Eve" was not intended to originally mean anything literally bad, death is interpreted as what occurs after the fall, "Adam", which in turn was the reference of Earth's relative position to Aten (the sun).
The convoluted nonsense you speak of comes by those who reinterpreted ancient COMMON stories meant ONLY to aid the memory of people in a world where hardly anyone was even able to read, to become LITERAL beings. For example, Adam's "rib" [modern reinterpretations] would have been understood THEN as the male penis (as in 'boner') and held some humor to its original listeners. The overall intentional caricature used the names of the characters in their stories from common terms for normal everyday concepts then understood.
Examples: "Eden" was the place where the sun rose (the East), "Aten" was the noon sun, "Atum" the EVEning sun or its
fall. When one culture wants to hide the root associations of some prior culture, people will alter subtle differences in spellings and/or pronunciations that
evolve to appear as though they had no connection far off into the future. Today's religious interpretion of collections of writings (scriptures) of the past LOSE the connection in the same way game of 'telephone' proves to distort the original input messages by the biases of the listener passing on their INTERPETATION bias along with what they hear.
So the 'sin', human intelligence, was NOT a crime, but a rationalizing of DEATH for us humans who evolved to reflect upon our existence intelletually. Only later distortions of the initial mundane meanings are what makes those stories seem so unique and odd to us. We are 'cursed' to recognize death as the depressing reality relative to our naive childhood interpretation that we can live for
ever.
AS to the question of the OP, then, both characters caricaturing us all did not 'sin' in our modern interpretation as something 'evil'. Both 'sin' and 'evil' derive from non-devious meanings. "Sin" was likely from Greek where "sine", for example, and where our modern terms that use, "syn-" to refer to two parts coinciding in a whole. If any actual 'sin' is referenced, it is our intellect in contrast to what we would think (falsely) of other non-human animals as being 'naive' or relatively blind or dumb.
I think the story is clever for their times if one removes the religious literalist interpretations. Many other stories of supposed 'real' characters in the other books (or parts) of the Bible were also likely valid if understood in the context of the original writers without actual religious interpretations.