Audie
Veteran Member
I don't literally believe in original sin or that Adam and Eve were real people. A lot of Christians seem to be on board with this being symbolic. Where I differ is that I believe the whole lot of it is symbolic, or at least most of it. The whole salvation because of the sacrifice of the innocent firstborn son I believe is symbolic too. And I think people have it wrong (wrong maybe isn't the correct word choice, but incorrect insofar as it accurately describes reality) that literally just believing it happens saves you from going to a literal hell and sends you to a literal heaven.
Here's the gist of what I think the basic story of the Bible means: Adam and Eve eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a reflection on the emergence of consciousness of mankind, and the "punishment" they receive is a reflection on the hardships that come along with being able to imagine the future (including the fact that childbirth hurts like hell because of the big skulls that we need to hold our big brains, and the max hip size women reached because if they got much bigger women wouldn't be able to run, and that wouldn't turn out well from an evolutionary standpoint.) We didn't start out perfect and then fall willingly, we never were perfect and never will be most likely. The rest of the Old Testament is largely fables about morality, which are very primitive in my estimation. They are discovering what must be done to have a functional society, but they're really bad at it so far and only have the most fundamental aspects down. The wars between tribes that have different gods who have different ethics is largely a battle of those very ethics rather than of actual gods. It works a lot like natural selection in biology. The ethic that is most "fit" for the environment is the one that persists, and many meld over the years.
When we get to the new testament, the idea of God has changed significantly. So much that it seems on the surface to be an entirely different god with a different nature. I don't think that's the case. I think the reason the old testament view of god stuck around is that it encompasses the tyrannical order that results when you don't have an operational mediator between order and chaos. That's what Jesus does. Jesus is what humanity, in the first century onward as it was updated and translated and edited into a workable form that seemed to satisfy the early church, was able to come up with as a representative of what a human being who was maximally perfect would look like. He was archetypal in the sense that he represents the best of the heroes of mankind. He undid the idea of pure order that had become tyrannical and outdated - the totalitarian, jealous god of the ancient Semites - and updated it with conscious, active engagement. He was the one who allowed the freedom of thought to begin to understand why the rules are what they are, rather than blindly following them. You know, the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. And the moral that follows his whole life is that the best way to live in the world is to focus your aim directly on the greatest good (God the Father; the structure of highest order), mediate between chaos and order through paying attention and telling the truth about what you see (this is why he is the "logos", the word), and bearing the responsibility of the suffering inherent in life. He took on the worst form of suffering, the suffering of the world, and the reason I think he represents the worst kind of suffering is that he was tortured and punished in the worst of ways they knew how for doing everything right. That shows us that doing everything right will not remove suffering from your life, but by taking responsibility (bearing your cross) and accepting it, you make life worth living. The idea of salvation is not from a literal afterlife (who the hell knows if there even is one) but from the hell that your life becomes if you don't live this way. And the heaven that following Jesus affords you is one that you build for yourself and those around you by living this way.
This is why it confounds me when fundamentalist continually wonder why I bother with Christianity at all. They think that, because I don't believe it literally, it must have no value. They see al the value in the historical accuracy of it all. I don't. I think the opposite. This story, wherever it came from and however these ancient people understood these things even subconsciously, it works when you live it out. There's the value. If you only believe in it literally and don't bother to see all the symbolism and allegory underneath it, I truly think you don't get anywhere near the whole benefit of it. I think that is the difference illustrated between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees. They know the law, but they don't know what it means, and so all they get from it is feeling high and mighty, but they don't understand. I think you can understand it symbolically as well as believeing it literally, but if all you get from the Bible is a history of life on earth, I think you are sorely missing the point.
Um...too long.
