Returning to The Garden: biochemical existence, the purpose of the law, and nudity

20. February 2010 by admin.

When I was a 19 year-old non-Christian, I argued that if the Bible was true, sin was God’s fault. At the time, it made sense to me that sin was a result of biochemical survival, in which an entire being’s existence is predicated upon—in theory—selfishness. Without the drive to eat and procreate and amass wealth for safety, the concept of sin seemed meaningless, and I was well aware that Adam and Eve had been eating in the Garden of Eden.

Of course, what eating implies is that the capability for sin already existed before Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, since satiation and perfect circumstances prevented the need for selfishness. But when God expelled us from the Garden, that is when our real problems began, making the present-day human evils more His fault than anyone else’s. As a young socialist keen on the idea of crime reduction through government subsistence for all—an idea I now firmly reject—it seemed sensible enough to conclude that God had built us to fail, as though God should have built us differently so that sin wouldn’t have had to exist. Read the rest of this entry »

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