On the matters of faiths, beliefs, sciences and worldviews.

In the beginning, God created the world, all the animals, and ultimately a man and a woman, right? Whatever went through the minds of the only two people in existence at that time had to have been put there, explicitely, by God, right? I mean, unless someone else was involved in the whole creation thing. Ok, but one of the things that God put in the brain of Adam and Eve was the, now infamous, capability of free will. This meant that they were both able to make choices, either this or that, go left or go right. Remember, God put that ability into Adam and Eve himself. He hadn’t created himself as Jesus yet, so there’s really no one else to blame at this point.

This is where the fun stuff happens. Adam and Eve, using some of that splendidly glorious free will that God explicitly made sure to put into their heads, ate a single fruit off of a single tree, the one and only tree in the entire garden of Eden that God told them they couldn’t eat of. The ironic part is that this fruit came from the tree of knowledge of right and wrong. Yes, boys and girls, God told Adam and Even not to do something that he would think was bad, before they had the ability to tell bad from good, right from wrong. They also used their free will, something God probably put into their heads to be used, not ignored.

So what happened? Oh, we all know what happened, don’t we? God punished Adam and Eve for doing what they couldn’t possibly know not to do, since they couldn’t know that what they did was wrong and God himself made them capable of choosing whether to obey or disobey, thanks to free will. But he didn’t settle for punishing those that wronged him, nooo… He punished all of mankind, forever! Because, apparently, that’s a fair punishment when you’re God.

The ridiculousness of the Christian creation myth isn’t what bothers me the most. All old cultures and religions have their own explanations for things that they, at the time, couldn’t understand. What bothers me is how they ignore the complexities of choice, morality and free will. They think it’s all black and white because their book says it is. They think that automatic damnation for each and everyone is a fitting punishment for doing, well, what you were made to do. I don’t see how God can have created us, and therefor alone bear all responsibility for how we turn out, yet punish us for doing exactly what we were supposed to do.

God, infinitely omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent as he is, could have created the world without choice, without free will. Had he done that, we wouldn’t have disappointed him by making the “wrong” choice (which he already knew we would, omniscient as he is) and both of us would have been happier today. After all, we humans are only aware of the choices we know about, so we’re still blissfully ignorant of all the choices we never knew about. Imagine how blissful we would have been without the knowledge of any choice whatsoever!

Ok, I began this post with an actual point, and I’ll try to make before sending all of you to sleep. The mythical story of the vengeful God that punishes man for something he made us do is one thing, but the more modern apologetic interpretations of the implications of God’s actions in that myth are completely senseless. They go against all logic, reason and evidence, and is maintained purely for the sake of scripture and people’s own sense of satisfaction. People want the ability to choose, but want to blame God’s “mysterious ways” whenever something goes wrong. They want to have “absolute” morality, but still want to be saved from the inevitable punishment. It bothers me that they don’t understand how oxymoronic it all is, that they don’t even want to understand. Ignorance is one thing, and defensible, but willful ignorance is, in my opinion, unforgivable.