About
The
Fall
of
man
Translation of a section from
"Het is Mogelijk" (It
is Possible), preliminary exercise and preparatory study for the Gospel
of Thomas, www.mogelijk.info
Like all myths and
fairy-tales
there is a
hidden
message in the story of man's fall. It is not anyhow an apple of anyhow
a tree, but explicitly is mentioned it was the tree of knowledge of
Good
and Evil. And Eva says to the serpent: "We may eat of the fruit of the
trees of the garden; But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst
of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye
touch it, lest ye die". It says so not at all God did forbid that, but
only if man would eat from it he would die, or put another way, he
would
expel himself from paradise. You can compare it with the fairy-tale of
Snow-white. The dwarfs so enjoined upon her not to accept anything, for
it could be dangerous, but she too yield to the temptation and the
promise
and had to pay dearly for that by falling asleep. Next fallen man needs
a saviour, like a prince to Snow-white. And they awaked and lived still
long and happily, but we are not as far as that.
In fact the Fall of Man is a
very
simple
story with
a same simple message and moreover it is the root of guilt and
projection.
You could read it as follows:
- God (or Nature
Spinoza
would say) has
decreed, by His
eternal and unchangeable Laws of Nature, what for man is good and what
is bad, for is own welfare, so he can live free, happy and unconcerned.
Blessedness consists so in living according the will of God or
according
Nature (like the statement of Spinoza again) .To eat of the tree of
knowledge
of good and evil merely means man starts decreeing arbitrary what is
good
and evil in his own conceit, to his own disaster.
- The serpent seduces Eva to
eat
that
apple and next she
gives it to Adam.
- And then both are called
to
account
and
at that moment
happens what still happens everyday and everywhere: the one blames the
other and the other blames the seduction and so they open the source of
guilt. Both reject the responsibility for their own behaviour and
opinionatedness
and so they expel themselves out of their innocence and paradise and
that
they consider as the punishment for their trespass. But it wasn't a
punishment,
but only a warning to stop with that pride.
The cruelty of the myth of the
Fall of
Man
is that it
is represented as a irreversible process and that isn't it. Like
Heraclite
says: "the way up and the way down is the same" so the way out and the
way in too. If the trespass of man is he decrees arbitrary what is good
and evil, he can stop doing this too. Still one man decrees the other
how
to live. The doctor decrees what is wholesome and unwholesome for his
patients,
parents teach their kids what is good and evil in their opinion, clergy
decrees what to believe and what not, scientists what is true and
untrue,
politicians what is good and bad for their citizens, trendsetters what
is in and what is out, judicature what is justice and what is
injustice,
establishment what is normal and abnormal, psychiatrists who is mad and
who is not, and so on and on.
That is the way men prefer
their
own laws
to the
eternal and unchangeable Law of God, or Nature and everybody can decide
for himself to stop with this pride. It is the pride of men they are
convinced
they know better than God and Nature and they have to make better
nature.
About 400 AC Pelagius, a
stranger
from
Ireland came
to Rome. He rejected the fatalistic irreversible doctrine by the
lickspittle
of the establishment, Augustinus about the fall of man and the original
sin. People sin, he said, by imitating and repeating the contravention
of Adam. But like all threats for the men of power Pelagius was
denounced
and Pelagianism eradicated.
In fact for the return to the
Promised
Land you only
need the message of the Fall of Man. The rest of Bible is only the
history
of a wandering nation, culminating in the appearance of a messianistic
movement, become known as "jesus", whose rise and fall are described
metaphorically
in the synoptic Gospels.