Eve Delivered Us From Ignorance

Why does Original Woman get hate for raising humans up?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Eve’s big sin — the much maligned original sin in the Bible— is eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. So that’s the reason that women are disrespected in all Western religions. That’s the reason women can’t be Catholic priests. That’s the reason Evangelical Christian wives are instructed to cede authority to their husbands.

And Eve’s sin is so heinous, so heavy duty, that it caused every single baby ever born to be unclean! At least, according to the Catholics. Which is why we have baptism. To wash the baby’s soul clean of Eve’s original sin.

I don’t get it.

Knowledge is good

Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but knowledge is GOOD! The more you know, the better off you are.

If Eve hadn’t eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, we’d be ignorant babies sitting around the Garden of Eden sucking our thumbs. We’d never create a work art — no painting, books, or music. We’d never have a deep or philosophical thought. We’d never invent anything, make a discovery, or evolve. We’d have nothing to say and nothing to do but eat and sleep and maybe sing a few praises. On occasion there would be some missionary-style sex. We’d be children forever.

That’s a horrible outcome!

If Bible readers were thinking clearly, they would get down on their knees and thank Eve for getting this whole human enterprise started, not criticize her for having the ovaries to take a bold step.

God is a bad parent

The Adam and Eve story also makes God sound like an abusive parent. Why would he want only obedience from humans — the creatures he supposedly created in his own image? Didn’t he already make dogs?

The job of a good parent is to help their children grow into decent adults. Not to keep them forever dependent. Not to cripple them. Good parents give their children both roots and wings. They don’t drop them in a beautiful garden prison and warn them never to leave.

The way it’s told now, God sounds like a mother with Munchhausen by Proxy syndrome, who convinces everyone that her daughter is debilitated (even though she really isn’t) because of all the attention it brings.

Forget the rib, Adam has no backbone

Another galling aspect of the story is how Adam weasels out of the blame. Adam also ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, remember, but he blamed it on Eve. And somehow, God fell for that crap!

I know whenever one of my children tried to blame his behavior on a sibling, I called BS. “You are responsible for your own actions,” I would tell him. “If your brother jumped off a bridge, would you jump off, too?”

Not only is saying “Eve made me do it,” a spineless cop out, it shows that Adam is not fit to lead. He has no integrity. No spirit. No ovaries. Eve should clearly be made the head of this household based on her intelligence to come up with a plan, courage to implement it, and charisma to get Adam to follow suit.

Obedience is not a good trait

Finally, God’s elevation of obedience above all other traits is horribly wrong. Obedience to authority is what caused the Holocaust. If instead of thinking they should do what they were told, Germans believed that they should do what was right according to their own internal moral compass, 6 million Jews might have lived to spawn future generations and the worst crime in human history would have been prevented.

After World War II it was popular to say that Germans were aberrations, that people from other countries would not have been willing to participate in a genocide. But multiple experiments proved that wrong. The famous Milgram Experiment conducted at Yale asked people to give increasingly strong electric shocks to others as a method to help them “learn” something. It was all a sham. No shocks were actually given. But the experiment showed that as long as a person in a white coat told them to do it, two-thirds of participants were willing to give potentially fatal electric shocks to other, blameless human beings. They were obedient to authority.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was equally enlightening. After dividing college students into prisoners and guards randomly, the experiment showed the guards became increasingly cruel while the prisoners became increasingly docile. In that case, one particularly “bad” guard influenced the others to let him carry out his evil schemes. The experiment so disoriented and upset the teacher who designed it, Philip Zimbardo, that he went on to teach people how to disobey authority, and listen to their inner voice of reason instead. He called it the Heroic Imagination Project.

Disobedience to authority: it’s what heroes do.

That’s why Eve is the best role model in the Adam and Eve story.

Adam and Eve story gets two stars

Nice imagery, beautiful setting, interesting characters well played. But overall, the story doesn’t make any sense. The director seems to have misunderstood which character is the protagonist (it’s Eve, not Adam), and which is the antagonist (God, not the Snake). And the overall theme of obedience is immature.

Tune in next week when we’ll discuss how cannibalism and vampire-ism are inexplicably transformed into holy activities in our review of the creepy Last Supper story.

For further reading…

My writing is free to readers who follow my links from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but if you’d like to read more, click here to join Medium for $5 a month and they’ll give me some of that money. (Yes!) For an email when I publish a new story, click here. Find more stories about Religion & Spirituality on this List, and about Women and Feminism over here. And for more of the good stuff, follow Fourth Wave, where we’re changing the world for the better, one story at a time. Got one of your own? Submit to the Wave!