Hey, It's Not My Fault. The Babe DId It!

Our Sunday school class is discussing the "Bad Girls of the Bible." I've always found an attraction to bad girls. Case in point, my wife. But that is another discussion. Trying to get a take on the traditional evil girls of the bible has been a bit of a challenge. The book we are reading takes a very literal approach. If it was written in the Bible, that is exactly what happened. As a mostly modern guy, I find this rather hard to digest. Eve was tempted by the serpent, who said this and that, and as a result of that temptation, Eve ate the apple, tricked Adam into eating it (my interpretation, of course), thus sending man into the unending spiral of sin. The first one. Perfect before then. And we only had that one little fruit we were not supposed to eat. That seems really simple doesn't it? But then again, it was from the "Tree of Knowledge." We all want to be smart, but as smart as God? How could we resist that?

The apple is a metaphor for something we lost long ago. It is described in the Bible as a loss of innocence. Adam and Eve suddenly knew they were naked. Cain kills Able. The rest is history. Maybe it did happen this way. Perhaps there was an obelisk that appears one morning. We scratch ourselves, eat a bug from our neighbor and suddenly discover that if we take a stick, and whack him on the head, he dies. (Ask any SciFi geek if you need help on that one.) We really don't need an apple to pull it off, to become who we really are. 

Maybe we are who we are. Maybe we are just animals. At least we were before we got the idea that our actions make a difference in the world. There was a time when we whacked somebody's head it just was something we did. Only when we developed the ability to realize that whacking heads resulted in our friends or mates disappearing from our lives that we though perhaps there is a better way. And we found a better way when enough us stopped whacking heads long enough to form a tribe, a village, and a nation. I hope we find a way real soon to stop whacking nations.