Adam and Eve had a pretty good thing going.

Think about it….they really did.

It was Paradise.  With a capital P.

And there was only one rule, really.  Just one.  That should be pretty easy to remember.

“Don’t eat from that tree.  Don’t eat from the tree of knowledge.”

I’m listening to an mp3 Bible that I downloaded from a link here.

It’s pretty familiar…fortunately, I grew up with the Bible…and, once I wade through all the killing and begetting, it’s pretty exciting.

This Adam and Eve thing is pretty bizarre, though.

God tells them, basically, “OK, here you go…I’m setting you up nicely, you’ve got everything you need, you should be just fine here.”

And it’s pretty nice for a while until an acquaintance…some snake up in a tree…tells Eve to just try this fruit and she’ll know as much as God and her eyes will be opened.

Wheeeeee.

And then the fun starts.  Welcome to the modern world.

People say that ignorance is bliss.

You have to wonder if it wasn’t so much a matter of God saying, after the fruit had been sampled and awareness came flooding over Adam and Eve, “OK….you’ve done it now…didn’t I tell you not to eat that?  Now it’s going to get really bad for you. I’m going to make things really bad for you.” but instead, maybe, “That’s really disappointing…but you’re not puppets…I gave you a choice…and now YOU KNOW.”

From something as simple as being naked in the world down to the worst of sins, now “you know”.

It’s no picnic in the Garden of Eden to have your eyes opened like that.

Maybe Hell is knowing?

The “Bible Scholars” would say that Hell is much more than that….”how naive a viewpoint” they’d think.

And I suppose there are a lot of levels to the situation.

I do wonder if the things that really bring us pain are the things we bring the most attention to. Until we were given the “gift/curse” of knowledge, we were oblivious to all but the gifts we were given.

God set this world up to be something better than just “good”…and until we made the mistake of having our eyes opened, that’s what we saw in the world.

We saw the good.

That probably is a pretty naïve and simplistic way of looking at the story of good and evil.

Evil already existed in the garden…(where’d that snake come from otherwise?)…but it was only at the moment when Adam and Eve only stopped looking for the good in their world that things fell apart for them.

To lose that ability to be unconsciously expectant of only good things is a real curse.

I know people who would say, “THAT AIN’T REAL!!!  THE WORLD’S A REAL PIECE OF CRAP!!! EVIL EVERYWHERE…ROBBING, KILLING, FAMINES, PESTILENCE…IT’S ALL GOING STRAIGHT DOWN TO THE FIERY PITS OF HELL!!!! AND IT’S BECAUSE ALL YOU PEOPLE ARE SINNNNNNERRRRRRRRSSSS!!!!”

Actually, I don’t think they know the word “pestilence”…so leave that one out.

Unfortunately, too, sometimes those guys are thumping on a Bible while they’re doing the yelling about how bad things are.

Some people really like to beat up a Bible.

What excites me, in spite of being fully aware of the bad in the world, is the possibility of something good.

We missed our shot at paradise….but we can make things better.

That’s something I really do believe.