I’ve seen that one meme post previously and it pushed me to rethink a little about the topic of the apple and the snake.
It’s obviously a story about becoming an adult. Just like Buddha escaped his temple to see the hungry, the sick and the dead, Adam and Eve exhausted their little isolated paradise and were curious enough to eat the apple (all blame is on woman, obviously).
And someone dropped a comparison to how it tracks with kids - the moment you say one thing on the table isn’t for them, be sure they’d take it. Then was this omnipotent, omniparent stupid, or irresponsible? Or didn’t they find a way to communicate complicated stuff to their children, like we don’t always have power in us to talk to our kids about sex and drugs? It seems like the case here. In their mind they could do so forever. And we all know how it’s bad.
For a long stretch of time god bought them all candies and toys, so their pockets seemed bottomless, but it’s so happens they aren’t. God produced this illusion around them, so they never knew what’s catching a cold is, what feeling a need is. But why it’s bad to know the truth? It sure hurts, but timely discovery makes one prepared. You know, prepared like an adult.
Let’s look at how Harry Potter was cool before we started to see a certain pattern in it’s awkward little details. Or how sunday school’s or choir’s kids looked so innocent and cute before we learnt more about religious indocrination and what track record pastors have with not abusing kids. How our one day delivery is possible due to drivers pissing in the bottles. Nestlé, Amazon, big oil, big pharma, cops, overseas operations, financial pyramids, influencers, tech visionaires, self-made billionaires, medievil knights.
It hurts to know the truth, but in the end it made us more conscious and prepared to reality. Like, we can avoid investing into dogecoin after the hype is long gone and we won’t collect anything on currency speculation.
It takes an adult to survive here. Satan in a shape of a snake was this cool aunt who fed you apple, showed you how god cared about you to defend from reality, equiped you with some actusl knowledge. They could’ve got their internal fight, but in the end, you wasn’t fit anymore to live in a lie.
Like you can’t watch and support that streamer who also doubles as a child groomer.
And the question I struggle to answer, why is it bad? Was it inescapable or god thought it is while it isn’t? Seeing it as a bad parenting issue adds some context. And I don’t feel like Satan giving an apple could become that influential if god himself wasn’t shy to share what he knows, it only became a problem because he didn’t. He built the Gardens of Eden on lies and when it became obvious, he just dropped their children into adult life miserably unpepared.
God sucks at parenting.
Disclaimer if it changes anything: I’m a Christian, and this is my theology response.
Ok, lets look at the Garden of Eden as a parable about God’s parenting (an important angle, but not the only important one). I think you’ve done a great job, but you’ve missed a couple of crucial details.
With God, you never have to go on your own. Human parents can’t provide for every need forever, which is why they need to prepare the child to leave home, but an immortal, omnipotent, omnipresent God can. The lack of preparing isn’t necessarily a bad mark on God’s parenting, because his role in parenting is different to ours.
I think you’ve got the wrong idea of what the tree of knowledge of good and evil really is, and by extension what Satan is really doing here. Since I’ve started looking into theology, I’ve found that wording it as the tree of “the right to define good and evil”, rather than “knowledge” makes far more sense. Before that point, they were trusting God (which is fair enough, given he’s God and all that), but by eating that fruit they’re basically saying “fuck you dad, stop telling me to get enough sleep and not come home drunk. I’m moving out so I can do all the fun things without you getting in the way” (a bit extreme, but you get my point). It wasn’t the “I’ve learnt all I can here, so now I’m moving out”, or a “you’re an abusive parent, and I’ll never thrive with you around”. The closest thing to it is the rebellious teen thinking they’re being held back.
If humanity leaving was as healthy a decision as you’re implying, why do Christians exist? If we knew God lied to us to try to keep us contained, we would never be going back to him. Christians see it as much more like the prodigal son. We chose to leave God so that we could see the real world. Turns out the real world is shit, so now we’re coming back to God, knowing that he actually does know what’s best for us.