Original Sin and pagan gods

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 06 Aug 2006, 18:55 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2006 11:55:09 -0700
Subject: (urth) Original Sin and pagan gods
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-F28D18B94BE0204BA083747D7560 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-F28D18B94BE0204BA083747D7560 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <1f7617370608061155y46f443c7tda2c5e71b3dae6de at mail.gmail.com>

b writes:

> The flood was meant to purify humanity from contamination

... ummm, not in any Bible I've ever read. God means to wipe out
all life on Earth, then gives Noah & family a reprieve. Though
Noah "walked with God" and all that, he is not "pure" -- first,
because he's descended from Adam and thus subject to the
taint of original sin (though that is not really a concept in the
OT); second, because he's a drunkard. So reducing the human
race to Noah isn't "purifying" by any means.

> while Jesus brought a different way of purifying sin.  The
> contamination of humanity with nephilim and Original Sin
> were both products of people interacting with fallen angels
> or demons/devils.

The idea that the serpent was "the devil," or even a devil,
is decidedly a bit of latter-day retconning: in Genesis, he's
just, well, a serpent. As for the nephilim ... nobody really
has a clue what they were supposed to be.

> What was Original Sin?  Eating of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of
> Knowledge was a disobedience of God's rule but what knowledge
> was gained?

It isn't "the tree of knowledge," it's the "tree of the knowledge of
good and evil," which answers the question. What that means is
a whole nother question. Charles Williams (the third of the fantasists
who hung about with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien in "the Inklings")
suggested that we should consider it "the knowledge of good _as_
evil" -- the idea that all that was created was good, and sin allows
us to see it as not-good. I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's
interesting.

> Adam and Eve's first act after eating the fruit was not to invent calculus
> or philosophy but to cover themselves with fig leaves.  So the forbidden
> knowledge they gained was a sexual awareness of each other.

Uhhh... no. Adam covers himself with fig leaves because "I saw that
I was naked, and I was afraid." The first "knowledge" gained from
knowing good and evil is the knowledge of how vulnerable we naked
apes are.

This kind of obviates the entire question of sex being forbidden, but
let's look at this detail...

> The anthropologist's "Universal Taboo" is incest.  From a SF (and
> perhaps Wolfe's) perspective, using Adam's rib to create Eve would
> be a form of cloning.

Ummmm.... not so much. It's pretty clear that more than simple
growth would be involved. You're thinking of miracles as scientific
processes; what Wolfe does (viz the cathedral and the balloon)
is to think of scientific processes as miracles.

> So Adam and Eve were really the closest of siblings, identical
> twins.  Even if that weren't true, Adam and Eve's children were full
> siblings and their intercourse was all incestuous.

No. While Genesis doesn't say where they came from, it's clear
that there are other people in the world: Cain leaves home after
killing Abel, and finds a wife _somewhere_ out there.

On the other hand, your point about the incestuous nature of the
pantheons of the surrounding peoples is right to the mark. In
particular, in Egypt -- which to the early Israelites was clearly
Hell on Earth -- the incestuous relations between the gods mirrored
(or was mirrored in) the incestuous marriages of the Pharaohs.
The throne descended through the female line; to keep it, the
Pharaohs would marry mothers, sisters, and daughters. This was
justified by Osiris' marriage to Isis; but which came first? The
primary cult of the Old Kingdom was the cult of Ra; the rise
of the cult of Osiris (and Isis, Horus, and Anubis) came later.

So, yeah, that point is very well made.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
"Shovels are essential to the fantasy genre.
However, they are primarily used by the authors rather than the
characters." -- Stephen R. Donaldson

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