GENESIS 3: The fall/rise of humanity:

Some problems with the traditional interpretation

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The ethical problem of personal vs. collective responsibility:

An ethical dilemma is posed by several parts of the Genesis 3 story: In most religious and secular moral systems, a person who commits a crime or who engages in sinful behavior must accept the full responsibility for the act. If one person robs a bank, the police arrest the person, not their father, their child, or neighbor. If a man commits a criminal or otherwise outrageous act, it is usually considered immoral to blame all males for the event. Similarly, it is normally considered immoral to blame all persons of the same nationality, religion, race, sexual orientation, etc. as the person who did the deed. Only the individual would be punished in a just society.

Yet, if we assume that Genesis 3 is an accurate description of a real event in the Garden of Eden, then we observe three profoundly unethical consequences of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil:

Imputation or transference of responsibility for a sinful or criminal act from one person to a group of individuals -- who might not have even been born at the time --  appears unjust and irrational to a modern individual who lives in a country where individual rights are paramount.

Conservative Christians have attempted to explain the process of imputation in a number of ways:

A modern-day parable:

Author Paul Alan Laughlin, a liberal Christian, drew an analogy between the story of Genesis 3 and "a more modern scenario." ₇ The following parable is based on his tale:

A woman bakes a batch of cookies for a party. She warns her twins, aged 3, to not eat any. She explained to them, deceitfully, that If they did, then she would kill them. Not thinking things through carefully, she placed the cookies on a table, easily accessible to the twins. A brother who was older, wiser and more mature that the twins asked whether their mother had forbidden them to eat anything in the house. The girl twin, Edna, said that mother had only forbidden them to eat the cookies -- on pain of death. The older brother chuckled and told his sister that parents did that a lot. He said: "Of course she wouldn't kill you. She simply wants to deny you the pleasure of munching on the cookies. She doesn't want to share the cookies. She wants to keep them all to herself."  Edna does exactly what any adult could predict: she eats one. Then, she persuades her twin brother Albert to eat another.

The mother returns, not aware of the twin's disobedience. She notices crumbs on the table and on the twins' lips. She correctly concludes that the twins have eaten cookies. She flies into a rage, beats them, and throws them out of the house to fend for themselves. She cuts them out of her will. She does all she can to make the lives of any future descendents of the twins miserable.

An outside observer might wonder why the mother did not have the sense to prevent the theft by putting the cookies out of reach of the twins. The observer would probably consider her an abusive parent for treating her children so harshly for simply doing what kids will naturally do. The observer might well consider the mother's actions indefensible, because the children are barely out of the toddler stage. They have no moral sense -- they cannot really differentiate between right and wrong.

Laughlin concludes that in Genesis 3: "We call this God 'just' and 'righteous' for putting temptation close at hand and punishing people who, in their naïve and childlike innocence, couldn't have known any better than to do a deed that any deity (or human) with common sense could have foreseen and prevented."

References:

1. "Imputation - The connection of humanity to Adam and Eve," ChristianBeliefs.org, at: http://christianbeliefs.org/articles/impute.html
2. Paul Laughlin, "Remedial Christianity: What every believer should know about the faith, and probably doesn't," Polebridge Press, (2000), Page 153. Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store.

Copyright © 2003 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Originally written: 2003-FEB-29
Latest update: 2003-FEB-29
Author: B.A. Robinson