Why Adam and Eve Created GOD

Western sexuality began in the Garden of Eden.  Or to put it a bit more precisely; Judaeo-Christian-Muslim sexual attitudes originate with the story of first two people, Adam and Eve.  We all have heard the myth of how mankind fell from God’s grace.  The not-so-subtle undertones of these first chapters in Genesis have framed men and women’s roles in ever since.  The message is very clear.  Man(not women) was created by God as the pinnacle of his creation—created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).  Woman was created out of a man, as an afterthought, for man’s purpose(Gen. 2:18).  It is woman’s fault man sinned(Gen. 3:6).  It is woman’s fault people no longer live in paradise(Gen. 3:12).  The woman is cursed with pain during childbirth(Gen. 3:16).  Because Eve ate the fruit of knowledge, the husband is to rule over the woman(Gen. 3:16).  Nakedness is something to be ashamed of(Gen. 3:7).  The creation story ends with a genealogy tracing human ancestry through the men and ignoring the women’s lineage—even claiming that this man or that man “begat” so-and-so!  Over and over the message of man’s predominance over woman is emphasized.  One can only wonder at how different life for all women over the last few thousand years would be—if only this fable had never been told. 

This is only a short summary of this chapter.  To find out more, please read Why Adam and Eve Created God.

Every religion charts a moral path for its faithful to follow.  Their compass is a set of standards to guide the faithful through life’s sea of moral dilemmas.  The teachings of the faiths are filled with thou shalls and shall nots, good deeds and sins.  The moral codes of our day, even the secular ones, are heavily influenced if not derived from religiously based ideas.  The laws of Moses.  The ten commandments.  The teachings of Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and Confucius.  These are the foundation on which the value systems of the world rest upon.  The specifics of the moral codes of the various faiths have tremendous differences, but there are certain themes that transcend all faiths.  Ashoka, the third century BC ruler ofNorth India summarized a universal religious morality:

 Doing as little harm as possible, in doing good in abundance, in the practice of love, of compassion, of truthfulness and purity, in all walks of life.

In the west, we summarize the most important moral postulate as “The Golden Rule”:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The faithful are certain that their moral codes would meet with Ashoka’s approval.  They are certain that their God, being the wisest in the universe, gave them the best set of standards to live by.  They are also certain that doing anything less will make the world a bad place to live.  Christians have added another dimension to their claim to moral superiority—if people do not abide by Christian standards, they will assuredly go to hell.  Not only are individuals cursed for doing bad, but whole nations may be damned.  The Bible is filled with stories of wayward nations who had to suffer the wrath of God because He was displeased with them.  The horrifying consequences of an angered God make the faithful take responsibility not only for their own souls, but the spiritual direction of their whole nation.  They are certain that if people displease God, He will curse their nation.  All of these certainties give the faithful a purpose to their morals, and also the ability to apply selectively apply the Golden Rule to only those with the same purpose.  Up until the eighteenth century, and even in many places today, it was taken for granted that religiously based moral standards are absolutely required in order to prevent society from digressing into evil, chaos, and cruelty.  Without religion (i.e. religious morals), it is assumed that society could not find its way. As our history has grievously shown, they are wrong.

This is only a short summary of this chapter.  To find out more, please read Why Adam and Eve Created God.

It takes a special energy to endure the hardships and ridicule religious leaders endure.  It takes convictions.  Convictions that can be hard for others to understand and appreciate.  These convictions comes from within him—from within his psyche.  They may reside in all of us, but only a few are motivated to express their passions to the extent we see in religious prophets.  How one person can take control of a whole group has already been established, but most religious people believe that their founder was more than just a person.  They credit him with some special divine guidance or power and maybe even credit him with being God himself.  Not only do the faithful claim their prophets are divine, but the prophets themselves are certain they are special.  So sure are they that they may even put their lives on the line to prove it. 

Certainly, the world has seen its share of deceitful liars trying to pass themselves off as religious prophets.  Counting on a small fraction of a percent of the billions of people on the earth to be fooled and follow them, they prey on the naive, the vulnerable, and the elderly for their personal gain.  They sold snake-oil a hundred years ago, and today they call themselves faith-healers, evangelists, re-birthers, and psychics.  A hundred years from now they will have a new game.  These tricksters know within their heart-of-hearts that they are fakes.  They know it and their actions show they know it.  But these are not the type of people that founded most of the great religions.  Jesus, Zoroaster, Mohammed, Buddha, Luther, Calvin, Smith, Augustine, Paul, and Mary Baker Eddy are very different.  With a conviction that is hard to appreciate, they knew they held something extraordinary.  These people knew that they were special, holding an insight into a spiritual truth far greater than other men and women possess.  They themselves were certain in this. They proclaimed it and many were willing to suffer scorn and die proving it.  The founding fathers of most religious sects bore a multitude of tribulations.  The list of the religiously persecuted is enormous, and the list of those who paid the ultimate price with their life is considerable.  What instilled in them such convictions they would die for?  What made them so certain of their calling? What nourished their ego?

This is only a short summary of this chapter.  To find out more, please read Why Adam and Eve Created God. 

The heavy blows science deals out to religion damages this first book of the Bible more than most any other.  Every time science seems to land what appears to be a knock-out punch against the myths of Genesis, the faithful find a way of re-interpreting their beliefs to soften the blow.  The Christian religions are dazed over just what to make of Genesis, especially the stories of the creation and the flood.   Jews and Muslims don’t take the creation story literally, so they’ve had no problems with science crushing it.  The book of Genesis tells us that God created heaven and the earth, in six days, about 6000-10,000 years ago.  Up until the last few hundred years, all Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths thought this time-table was quite reasonable and the stories absolutely true.  Adam and Eve actually strolled around a beautiful garden, not that many years ago.  No question about it. Jesus, Mohammed, and Abraham are not ever reported to have disagreed with this notion.  But then came Darwin and things changed.  The evidence that the earth evolved over billions of years, and humans evolved over millions of years from primate ancestors in Africa is overwhelming.    Currently, almost no faiths officially maintain a literal interpretation of Genesis.  No reasonable argument can be made for one.  Science put an end to a need for the Creator.  “To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant.”[1]  Even Pope John Paul II declared that evolution should be studied and it is “more than a hypothesis.”[2]  Intellectually, most religions downplay the significance of Genesis, but unofficially, the Adam and Eve story is alive and well.  Ignorance is an unfair characterization though.  Its not ignorance that perpetuates Genesis but rather it is a life-time of religious indoctrination, socials pressures, insecurities, and miss-information.  As unbelievable as the Genesis story is, it is also very necessary to Christianity.   The Apostle Paul framed the fundamental basis of the Christian faith around Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross.  Jesus was sacrificed to atone for Adam’s original sin.  If there is no Garden of Eden or no real person named Adam, then Paul’s explanation for why Jesus died falls apart.  Regardless of the facts, Christians can’t ever dismiss Genesis.

This is only a short summary of this chapter.  To find out more, please read Why Adam and Eve Created God.

Five hundred years ago, it is easy to understand how very smart people could still believe in a God. Without only simple time keeping devices to help plot his course, it seemed like a miracle that a man like Magellan could navigate the globe.  Great accomplishments were done with hard work, bright minds, persistence, and lots of luck, for precision wasn’t available and science wasn’t trusted.  In our scientific age, if something is proven “scientifically”, it gains a certain level of credibility.  There will always be those who believe in big-foot, alien encounters, healing crystals, and psychics, but for an idea to stay in the mainstream in the western world, there must be some scientific basis.  It does not have to be good science, or accurate science, or even scientificallycarried out, it just needs to appear scientifically plausible so that the doubting mind can assure itself that there is a basis to its belief.  The examples of pseudo-science are everywhere. 

This is only a short summary of this chapter.  To find out more, please read Why Adam and Eve Created God. 

Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”  This summarizes most Christian’s confidence in their God.  It also could apply to any Jew, or Muslim, for all are certain their faith is the true one.  One way or another, God gives meaning to life and through His words the believers encounter it.  It seems reasonable to think that the words from the God in the Bible, Torah, or Quran, should embody some transcendental truth—a core of supreme knowledge. Believers should be able to fall back on scriptures to support their faith.  But what we find is just the opposite. 

This is only a short summary of this chapter.  To find out more, please read Why Adam and Eve Created God. 

In America, and so many other nations, prayer is a universally accepted solution to most every problem, and it still is completely taboo to question someone’s request for a prayer.  “Pray for me.”  “Let us pray that they…”  “I pray that they don’t….”  “Let’s say grace…”  These phrases are part of our language, and our culture.  The atheist politely ignores them, for what harm can come from such a quaint custom?  But the faithful do believe that God hears them and answers their prayers. They believe that because they pray the outcome of some event can change in their favor – not always, but there is a chance it will.  They believe God’s hand is in their daily life and in the workings of our world.  It is easy to understand how primitive man could believe that the Gods were controlling everything.  Even the superstition man of the middle-ages needed God to account for the mysteries that science had not yet solved.  But today, no-one with a curiosity and a web browser needs God.  The average person is truly challenged to come up with a science or biology question that isn’t readily answered by a quick search on the Internet.  But yet, well-educated people still believe that everything we know about mankind and the universe is changed at the whim of God.  They are certain God daily directs the events in the lives of billions of people on the planet.  But if God were meddling with nature, would not there be some evidence of it?  Think about how precisely we now measure and monitor our universe.  Global Positioning Satellites can gauge, track, and predict the location of any place or thing on the plant to an accuracy of an inch.  We can precisely predict how chemical reactions work, down to the atomic level.  The global variations in gravity are measured down to ± 0.0015%.  Geneticists have mapped the complete human Genome, all 3 billion base pairs.  Science has identified the specific genes that cause our looks, our health, our race, and our inherited diseases.  With amazing detail, doctors can study an MRI or CAT scan to reveal minute details of the body.  Astronomers measure the length of a year as 365.256363051 days, and can predict the duration of next year to within a 10 millionth of a second.  We understand so much now, so why ignore what we already know?  Never has an MRI shown new tissue appear that wasn’t naturally there. Never has one of the billions of photos taken each day shown nature do anything un-natural.  Never has gravity failed to pull.  There isn’t any natural process that ever acts un-natural, and nothing science has ever explored needs God to explain how it works. 

This is only a short summary of this chapter.  To find out more, please read Why Adam and Eve Created God.

The adventures of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland excited us as children.  They were more than just good stories.  They were filled with symbolism that consciously was cute but unbelievable.  However, they were profoundly appealing stories on a subconscious level and to this day delight many children and adults.  Leaving the Never-Never Land of childhood did not mean we left our psyche behind.  Mythology for the adults fills theaters, sports stadiums, and books.  And most of all, it permeates the churches and synagogues of our land.  As Carl Jung said, “modern man continues to respond to profound psychic influences of a kind that, consciously, he dismisses as little more than the folk tales of superstitious and uneducated peoples.”[1]  Logically, our twentieth-century mind doesn’t want to subscribe to two-thousand old superstitions, but something still attracts the masses.  Myths make religion possible—arousing both conscious and unconscious reactions.  Nevertheless, their appeal to our dual-nature mind does not mean there is any more truth to them than Peter or Alice.

This is only a short summary of this chapter.  To find out more, please read Why Adam and Eve Created God.