The sesquicentennial of the Civil War is upon us, another opportunity for southerners to insist it wasn’t about slavery – merely about the right to live as they chose, a way of life that just happened to have depended on the enslavement of other human beings. Slavery was unquestionably the great moral issue of its day, and many would have us believe that today’s corresponding g.m.i. (or gimme, like a golf shot about which they feel there should be no argument) is abortion.

I fully understand the pro-lifers’ position. I just find it erroneous and based on questionable suppositions. They claim that a fertilized ovum is “a life” and as deserving of protection as any postnatal human. They submit as evidence ultrasound representations of fetal activity and would compel any woman contemplating abortion to view such evidence, as if it could melt her hardened heart.

For me, the issue isn’t life or not-yet-life. It isn’t degree of sentience, or determining the extent to which the response of fetal nerve pathways indicates pain or pleasure with which we should empathize. No, the 800-gram gorilla in the womb is what I don’t hear actually discussed that often: soul.

Pro-lifers believe that the union of sperm and egg doesn’t merely trigger a chain of mitotic events, it marks the magical instant in which the ovum is imbued with a soul. Even contraception that prevents implantation is murder, they maintain. But in order to be concerned over the fate of said soul, one must first accept that such an entity exists.

It’s hard to imagine that one doesn’t have a soul, we’re so inculcated with that belief. We think, we feel, we imagine ... surely this sets us apart from other animals, surely this is a sign that there’s something inside of us that drives our lives, that even survives the death of our physical bodies. Why is it so hard to accept the idea that all of our mental activities are biochemical? Because we want to believe. Because we’re afraid of being simply snuffed out, so go along with the fiction that a discorporate part of us will journey on to some other realm.

But I’m open-minded about it. Maybe there is in fact something about the brain’s electrical energy that actually survives death. Maybe through that energy we even have the option to reincarnate. Maybe we “grow” a soul by processing experience. But part of that experiential growth is self-awareness, and I have strong doubts (but cannot claim to actually know) that this commences in the womb. Cumulative memory, personality, instincts, fears – all of these things are stirred into the pot. Call it “soul-cooking” if you want, but it doesn’t start simmering until we start interacting with the world.

It’s all the legacy of Eden. So many people accept the premises of that fable, including the notion that a paternal deity breathed a soul into Adam. And as with so many other instances in life, they never stop to question premises. That fable was how a primitive people explained what they couldn’t understand, but the fact that that explanation survived unchallenged for millennia doesn’t make it so.

What I can never wrap my head around is the fact that pro-lifers aren’t vegetarians, that all life isn’t just as sacred. It must be because animals lack souls; after all, didn’t Genesis say they were put on earth for our benefit? And I’d bet a lot of pro-lifers have no qualms about capital punishment, since it’s right there in the Bible. (As, of course, is slavery.)

Then there’s the cuteness factor. We humans seem to melt in the face of babies (not just human babies: baby ducks, puppies, kittens of course... they may not have souls but they’re adorable), so potential babies strike a chord with many folks. They can’t help but insist that a fetus is more than merely the result of a replication machine doing its thing and instinctively want to protect it.

So when it comes to today’s great moral issue, I sometimes feel strange being on the receiving end of moralists’ pointing fingers – especially when they haul out the slavery analogy – but no more so, when you get right down to it, than if I were part of a conspiracy advocating the demythification of Santa Claus. It’s all well and good to decry cutting short a human life once it’s part of the world; but if pro-lifers didn’t believe that the fertilized egg harbored a soul, would they care? If their religious tradition dictated that the soul descended into the body as it emerged from the birth canal, would they instead urge abortions for unwanted children before they were so invested?

The pro-lifers see it as a gimme, and I don’t deny them their point of view. But it’s only a gimme when the whole idea of “soul” is as well.

The telling point in the fable of Adam is that he didn't really want to eat the fruit. He didn't seek it out. Nor for that matter, did Eve. The serpent beguiled her, and that was that.

But what triggered that first instance of succumbing to desire? Genesis blames the Evil inherent in Existence – the fly in the ointment – but has humanity paying the price.

What it seems to be about is the creation of desire: for objects of perception, for knowledge.

Before the Fall, Adam had no desires because he was looked after by God, much alike a house pet today. He didn't even ask for a mate: God decided he shouldn't be alone. And without the knowledge of good & evil, Adam & Eve presumably didn't even “know” one another, so there was no sexual desire either.

Desire enters into the story by the back door, a stage device. The serpent is the gun on the wall. If no serpent, then no temptation, and no Fall.

Does this point to an early human condition in which it did not occur to people to want things? They satisfied their physical needs when such needs were felt, but there was no sense of calculation or covetousness.

Perhaps there was no sense of boredom either. (Do animals get bored? My cat, doing nothing all day? Cows in a field? Chickens? The burro forced to follow the same circular path giving rides to children?) We can suppose that before the Fall Adam didn't get bored because he didn't have desire and didn’t crave experience.

Desire arises out of the process of comparison: we see something that we recognize as “better” (or perhaps only different) than what we have.

Perhaps the crux of the allegory is the creation of woman: the creation of difference where there had been none, the invitation to compare (“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”). From that standpoint, it was God who planted the seed of desire.

And just look at what desire creates: attachment, identification of the self with things outside it. And attachment breeds seeking advantage, because when we identify with things and concepts we want to protect them, to solidify our positions, so we need to gain the upper hand against the possibility that we might lose them.

And seeking advantage creates all kinds of problems, because what might help me in my advantage might in some way disadvantage you. So swallow that fruit and let the games begin!

Now there are some people out there who take the Bible literally. But as Ira Gershwin wrote, “the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible – it ain’t necessarily so.” I’m not out to challenge anyone’s beliefs about how to conduct oneself in this life or about what to expect in the next one. And I don’t want to argue about Jesus’ message – at least not for now. But I would like to address those people who consider themselves creationists or “young earth” proponents and encourage them to reexamine their beliefs from two rational perspectives.

In the first place, the world is full of creation myths. Every culture has one. Whether you’re looking at the Levant or sub-Saharan Africa or the North America deserts or the Amazonian jungles or the central Asian steppes, the ancient world was full of tribal societies that speculated about how everything got started. All you have to imagine is a primitive family huddling around a cook-fire while an elder tells stories about the ancestors. Maybe s/he heard them from elders gone before; maybe s/he made them up. But the upshot is, each of these people came up with their own version of the Beginning. There’s just no way anyone can seriously believe that one particular group of people tucked away in a corner of the eastern Mediterranean world has a lock on the “true story” of creation.

But if you have a fundamentalist leaning, I know your response: it’s in the Bible; therefore it must be true. (Yes, I also went to Sunday school and learned that song: “How do I know? The Bible tells me so!”)

So secondly, I’d like to splash some cold water on that line of thought. The Bible, as we know it, was assembled from a range of sacred texts by leaders of the early Christian church, some of whom didn’t even want to see the Old Testament included. Unlike the Qur’an, which is held to be a revelation to Muhammad, or the Buddhist sutras, which are sermons of Gautama, the Bible is a vast tapestry of all kinds of writings: Judaic histories, folklore, literary works, and prophesies in the Old Testament; various accounts of the life of Jesus and letters of his first followers to early churches in the New. Those who adhere to the Bible refer to it as “the Word of God”; yet nowhere in its pages is that claim made – because it consists of bits and pieces that were written by different people over hundreds of years before the Bible was even assembled. It’s as if those early church fathers emerged from a room with the book they’d cobbled together and proclaimed, “We declare this to be the Word of God.” And so it became by popular acclaim.

In the original Star Trek series, there was an episode called “A Piece of the Action.” The crew of the Enterprise encountered a culture on a faraway planet that had adopted the customs of early twentieth century American gangsters – all because a previous starship had left behind a book called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties. People of that planet designated it a sacred book and proceeded to build their society around it. They justified their lifestyle by claiming they simply did what was written “in the book.”

That, unfortunately, is the situation with you creationists and young earthers. You take what’s “in the book” as gospel [sic] and refuse to hear otherwise. You turn your heads to objective evidence that refutes the creation myth of one isolated people – all because that myth that has been granted legitimacy by having been included in an anthology that has been proclaimed indisputable by those who do not wish to have it disputed.

You say to me, “Yes, but it’s God’s word.”

I reply, “Sez who?”

No doubt about it, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil bears some pretty tasty fruit.

Let your imagination stretch for a minute: think yourself back to Eden in the days before Adam & Eve partook of that persuasive produce. If what it imparted was “knowledge of good and evil,” then what that suggests is that, prior to gaining it, these first people literally did not know right from wrong, good from bad, better from worse. Their brains were not capable of making value judgments. They lived in the moment, not retaining memories of pleasure or pain with which they could compare life’s ongoing occurrences.

Is it possible that human beings were once like that? Little more than – dare one propose it – furless apes?

So according to the biblical scenario, after gaining this knowledge humans can say “this is good,” “that is bad.” Why do you suppose a deity would want to keep that thought process from his most favored beings? With that knowledge, as He begrudgingly points out, we become like God and His angels; without it, we are no different from the rest of the animals of Creation.

What it seems like to me is that the Eden story tells of an erect biped gaining the powers of discrimination – what we might even label “intelligence” – so that, looked at from such a slightly detached perspective, this fable tells the whole story of human evolution in one easy-to-grasp narrative – just like Genesis’s preceding account of the Creation was kind of a simplified rendition of the Big Bang (albeit one that could easily be understood by a tribal people who didn’t have much comprehension of high-energy particle physics. Remember, we’re talking a few thousand years before a different apple introduced Isaac Newton to the concept of gravity, so physics was hardly a required course.)

If you think about it, this whole Eden story makes you wonder what’s going on with Genesis. Just how literally can it possibly be taken?

Opening blog: first bite

When Adam first sank his teeth into the apple, he bit off far more than we could chew.

We all know the tale, and it doesn’t matter whether you consider this Bible story to be fact or fable. You could be the most literal fundamentalist or the most skeptical freethinker on the block, but you can’t get away from the fact that the story of the Fall has set the tone for all of western history, and for our present way of life.

The story of Adam & Eve has shaped western civilization’s attitudes toward nature, sin, evil, gender relations, and man’s relation with divinity, all within the context of that one event on which it centers: the Fall. Sin goes all the way back to the story of Adam & Eve. The story of the Fall is the account of man’s first sin.

But just what was the Fall, a “downfall” as seems to be commonly held, or a slide from blissfully ignorant grace into intellectual discrimination? And what was the “sin,” merely disobeying God or gaining the forbidden knowledge of good & evil?

Why should the knowledge of good & evil have been forbidden? Because an all-knowing God knew that the power of discrimination brought with it indiscriminate desire?

If you look at the story as fable, you have to think of it in terms of the purpose it served. Fables were created to explain things or to teach lessons. (Remember Aesop?) In the case of Adam & Eve, their story conveniently explained why we have to work for a living: because our ancestors were kicked out of a paradise in which they didn’t have to lift a finger. Isn’t that a story likely to be told by primitive peoples around a campfire? Once upon a time people didn’t have to hunt animals or till fields, all they had to do was reach up and pick fruit from trees; then one day they picked the wrong fruit....

That seems to be a simple explanation for how such a fable might have come about, but somewhere along the line in the development of religion, a different theme was seized upon: the story of the Fall explains why there is sin in the world. Church fathers found it convenient to infer from Genesis that Adam’s punishment imposed the stigma of sin on all of his descendants when in fact that isn’t stated at all. Go and re-read chapter 3: sure, God meted out some heavy punishment—painful childbirth for women, a life of hard labor for men—but nowhere does He say that mankind is forever burdened with something that has to be atoned for. That was what subsequent theologians read into the event.

Just what is the origin of the story of the Fall? Did one person, some Hebraic Homer, make it up or is it part of some oral tradition common to many peoples? Julian Ford has an interesting interpretation. In his book The Story of Paradise, he ties the legend of Eden to the folklore of Mesolithic peoples who sought to commit to group memory key events in their distant past: a severe drought, the discovery of irrigation, and an explanation for volcanic activity. In a nutshell, Ford links the Fall to a people’s eating forbidden fruit of a totemic tree during a time of famine and drought. It turned out to be the coconut, which not only yielded its succulent flesh and milk but also gave them a waterproof container that enabled Neolithic peoples to carry water and “become as gods”—the rain gods on whom they had depended. The flaming sword of the angel guarding the tree of life was, suggests Ford, a volcanic plume.

But there’s more to Ford’s explanation: “Since women had been the chief repositories of the agricultural mysteries, and the seism which destroyed Eden was seen as divine retribution for the agricultural activities which angered the rain god, it was quickly decided that Eve was the great culprit and that she alone bore the onus of responsibility for the disaster which had struck the Adam people. Eve was now tarnished with the reputation of sinner and evil-doer and her power and social standing vanished overnight.”

Ford isn’t the only one to suggest that the story of Adam & Eve is a means of putting women in their place. Archaeological evidence points to the prevalence of a Goddess cult in Neolithic society, and in the face of an up-and-coming deity like Jehovah, myth is a powerful tool for overturning entrenched beliefs.

Just as the mythology and folklore of many cultures have their versions of creation, even the flood, there are other explanations of the Fall—just consider the Greek myth of Pandora. Myths are created to explain phenomena, and while the Greeks were concerned with explaining the existence of a spectrum of curses, the author of Genesis created the myth of Adam to explain why man is sinful and needs to obey God’s law.

This notion of sin is the bedrock of Judeo-Christian belief, since it is sin that requires salvation. (As an aside, let me observe that the success of any religion in attracting and holding followers depends upon premises that are never challenged, that are so ingrained in tradition that it is unthinkable to question them. Buddhism seems to depend on Gautama’s First Noble Truth—that “life is suffering”—but also rests on Brahmanic belief in reincarnation and the need to be freed from it. Christianity rests on the need for salvation, but salvation is necessary only because there is sin.)

But there is an aspect of the Fall that is not often discussed. Most interpretations focus simply on the fact that Adam disobeyed God, for which we all supposedly pay. But consider what it was he did: he obtained the knowledge of good and evil. According to Genesis, this knowledge had been privileged information, known only to God and his angelic sidekicks. That’s why God mutters that “man has now become like one of us” and boots Adam and his missus out of Eden before he gets a taste of the fruit from the Tree of Life.

So just what is this “knowledge of good and evil” that the apples of Eden were ripe to dispense?