When I heard as a child the story of Adam and Eve, my initial response to such a story was to smile; it struck me as ridiculous and laughable.
In today’s lingo “You can’t be serious!”
Indeed, all my life I felt this story stretches credulity beyond the bend; it boggles the imagination to try and comprehend how any thinking human being could take such a story seriously.
Yes, I am aware it is part of an official church doctrine that is considered unquestionable. Makes sense–such a tale has to be surrounded with the sanctimonious smugness of dogma because otherwise it would never survive close scrutiny.
I think such stories serve to drown out a much more promising use of reason among humans if our reasoning ability were allow to blossom, unfettered by such stories.
GARDEN OF EDEN
Do you ever think about the artistic depictions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? Of course, such paintings only occur many centuries later, born from the fertile imagination of artists.
Nonetheless, these paintings no doubt help many “believers” to see the scene as real–as real as it gets anyway–since there are no drawings, paintings, photographs, or video from the garden itself so far as anyone knows.
Artists of the High Middle Ages and the later Renaissance gave free rein to their imaginations; they could brilliantly conceptualize the green flora and fauna and the two shy human figures however they chose.
After first visualizing for themselves what such a scene might have looked like, they are able to share this product of their imagination, this personal vision, with others.
In other words, they’ve taken scenes from the bible and made them “real” by painting an image that seems appropriate. The circle is complete from an artistic, if not historical, point of view. (No one knows what “Adam and Eve” really looked like, supposing such a couple ever existed, which is itself is highly unlikely.)
THE BELLY BUTTON QUESTION
One question I have for these artists is: did Adam and Eve each have a navel or “a belly button”? Did you paint them so?
If the artists are paying attention to such human anatomical details based on the human form of their own day and time, I would think, yes.
But then again, maybe no; what need would there to be to paint such a small private detail? Or, for that matter, what need either figure of such an anatomical feature?
It was only after Eve gave birth that the belly button for the firstborn was needed as a life-line between mother and child—the navel being the terminus of the umbilical cord.
Or aren’t we supposed to believe that Eve’s first-born would have been nourished through the umbilical cord, even if it was never true for her?
She did not start life as an infant but comes on the scene full-grown, does she not? Which is to say, Eve herself wasn’t born from a human mother, apparently, but appeared instantly, more or less, along with Adam. In other words: if they did have navels, why?
TIME TRAVEL
If we could travel back in time and meet them both, this first happy couple, what would we find: two individuals each with a belly button . . . or no belly button?
That anyone would think that it is possible to imagine a human being without a navel simply boggles the imagination. It means they do not understand one of the simplest, most basic facts of all nature. Every human being is the result of sexual reproduction: sexual intercourse by their parents.
They do not believe a human baby must be born from a woman who became pregnant in the usual way. This is such a stupendous suspension of the critical reasoning faculty as to defy description!
IGNORANCE IS BLISS
The story of Adam and Eve should be considered the poster child for ignorance. It is not rational; it is not credible; it is not possible.
It reveals the enormous harm “faith” does to the reasoning faculty of humans and how it allows, even encourages, narrow-minded petty tyrannies to keep emerging as a result. Religious obstinacy prevents intelligent criticism of its doctrines.
Religious stubbornness fights like hell against the adoption of modern thinking based on knowledge and the latest scientific evidence.
Tyrants thrive on absolutism, dogmatism, and narrow-mindedness.
These Adam-and-Eve myths have damaged the human psyche for centuries. Such a tale has reduced or eliminated the manifold possibilities of a much more expansive glorious kind of human reason in a new type of society.
Don’t consider such a story merely a simple fable: to be told to accept it as gospel in an unquestioning manner in the end represents a new tyranny over the minds of humans!
LOOK IN THE MIRROR
Look at yourself in the mirror and check to see if you have a belly button. If you do, ask yourself this one question: why? What’s its purpose?
If you were to travel back in time, generation by generation, navel by navel, are you prepared to finally meet an ancestor who was not conceived and born as the result of sexual reproduction?
Were we to suggest as much for your parents or grandparents, you would scoff. Your parents weren’t the natural biological offspring of your grandparents; they were created all at once out of mud and ribs.
Yet push the historical time-table far enough back and somehow we get a “maybe”: maybe Adam and Eve were created without sexual activity.
In any other context than the religious one, such a view would be laughable with an offer to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge coming soon after. One human being made from mud and clay and another from a bone from a rib cage?
Perhaps we lack sufficient imagination to consider how each generation is the offspring of the previous one, for somehow–while traveling backward in time–the religious among us have managed to conclude that such a parent-child arrangement is no longer necessary.
They think they will come to a generation that is different . . . but if we could keep traveling back in time to meet those long-ago ancestral generations, would we really find a human being starting life as an adult and not a child? Was never a baby? Never had parents that had sexual intercourse? Was never “born” at all from a mother’s womb?
Meet Adam and Eve, mud and rib creations.
Really, people!
