etee's Blog

I, like many others, learned my religious beliefs from listening to my parents reading me Bible stories, from the lessons taught by my Sunday School teachers, and from hearing the sermons in Sunday worship services. As a child, I took these lessons to heart, and accepted them uncritically. As an adult, I have been reexamining the stories and beliefs on which my faith is based, and I have decided to share some of this journey with you.

To begin with, I decided to tackle a Bible verse at the very heart of the condition of Man, and of his relationship to God:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Gen 2:17, KJV)

This verse lays out the foundation for our doctrine of Original Sin; the one prohibition that God laid upon Adam, the violation of which brought upon mankind the curse of sin and death, and required God to sacrifice His son in order to redeem us from the clutches of the evil deceiver, Satan.

When I was younger (in physical age as well as spiritually), I accepted this passage (and the doctrine that springs from it), though I was never exactly comfortable with the message it imparts: that we, the descendants of Adam and Eve, are somehow held responsible for their failings. Early on, I thought that this prohibition was God's "test" of us, of our worthiness to be in fellowship with Him. However, this seemed a rather meaningless test: what could be so wrong about knowing the difference between good (right) and evil (wrong)? Later on, I thought this was meant more as a Heavenly admonishment: that, as we might warn our own children against jumping off the roof lest they come to harm, so did our Father warn us.

These days, I see this verse in a slightly different light. Master psychologist that He is, God knew what would happen as we grew up, and became aware of the concepts of right and wrong: while we would want to do right, far too often we would fall short of this lofty goal, and do the wrong thing. We would then obsess and stress out over our failings, which would set off physiological reactions which (as we now know) would have an adverse effect on our health, both mental and physical. Even worse, we would compensate for our own failings by trying to impose our viewpoints on others, and because we are driven toward perfection, we would overdo this - crossing the line that separates 'creating necessary rules to ensure we live together' and 'creating a social order that acts to ostracize those who don't share our values.'

Therefore, this verse is a warning - a warning for all of us to quit holding both ourselves and others to an impossibly high standard, to lighten up and back off, to come down off our moral high horses, so that we can in fact 'all just get along.' It will not only enhance the length of our lives, but the quality of our lives as well.