Rabbits Full of Magic

Like it or not, modern pop culture is radicalizing people and pushing a soft totalitarian bottom-up definition of Modern Morality on the populace. As the world has been forced by fate to look into exactly what they think of justice, it led me back to my faith, with which I am approaching anew after spending a decade as a decadent 20s atheist. As a kid, I did not understand these stories, I did not understand the concepts. I admit I am still learning and may perhaps never fully grok all of this, but after spending several decades reading mysticisim and religious texts from around the world, things are starting to finally fall into place for me. Revisiting the very start of the Bible yesterday was an insightful read and I want to share some insights I had.

As a Christian I believe that we get our morality from our creator, that everything you need to know about justice is in the Bible. That God is a righteous and just judge, and that in spite of all of the evils in the world, He is a mercyful one. In fact, one can notice that his allowing evil to go on is itself a sort of mercy. The Problem Of Evil is an old one, but personally I have found an answer that satisfies me and I believe is perfectly in line with Christian theology. 

You see, "Evil" is not a thing in and of itself. I don't mean that objective good and evil do not exist or there are no differences between them, but that evil is more of a "shadow" of the "light" of good. Light is something that exists, it is something the transcends everything it comes in contact with, and allows us to perceive it as real. Light visually creates reality for a 3 dimensional sensory-based carbon (dust)-based life form such as us. Yet a shadow has no existence apart from the light that is primary to it. If a room is pitch black and nothing can be seen, there is no shadow to speak of, because a shadow requires light to be referenced against. "Shadow" simply means a lack of light, and not even a transcendent one, but a localized, periodic, gap in the light which permeates all objects in it's vicinity. It is not as if you can place an object that produces shadow in a lit room, and have everything be totally covered in darkness. Objects such as lightbulbs or gas-based neon tubes or naturally occurring fire exist which produce light but there is not an object which can do the same for dark. The best one can do is cover up the light source. This is why God first creates light, and at least one reason why it is "good".

Remember, the first thing created by God in the Bible is light itself, which He judges as "good". Right away, from the very first thing created, the Creator is judging whether it is good or not. I am a musician and an artist and an wholly sympathize with this, the fundamental relationship between the Creator and their creation. It is a relationship that is reflected in so many aspects of reality, in father to son, in worker to product, in musician to a live performance. In the human existence and the performance of the Acts of Being Human. Right from the start, God is judging His creation, like anyone would, and says it is "good". 

God creates all of reality, He constructs the world and finishes with the Garden of Eden, which is atop a holy mountain, the 4 rivers flowing from it, and as we all know, the source of rivers is in the mountains, where the rains fall down. Earlier in Genesis God separated the waters, meaning the waters of the oceans and the waters of the sky, the clouds in the atmosphere. Later on in Genesis, God will separate Adam into Adam and Eve, splitting man into the man-woman dynamic. This is another separation, and is done to show that things which are separated have some innate desire to re-combine, to join together, in unity. The water of the ocean is always being pulled into the sky and that water is later falling back down to earth. It is not that God separates the waters and the water from the ocean just goes into space never to be seen again. That would scientifically kill the water and leave the Earth with no atmosphere. No, that does not happen, because God does this and declares it good it is not a permanent separation. The water comes back to earth as an act of mercy, a reunion of sorts. In this is kind of a microcosmos of the entire Christian story, the death, the fated resurrection, all of it. Not just of Jesus but of the larger Revelation. See, you cannot simply read the Bible like it is a Wikipedia article. It is a fractal work, each story containing symbols and levels of meaning that spiral out and are reflective of a complex, holographic, symbolic depiction of reality. You may have heard people are writing "cheat codes to reality" on whatever social media site is being hyped at the moment. The Bible is this. But society is so anti-Christian and anti-thought and anti-freedom that everyone has been raised to be culturally illiterate and must be deprogrammed to even begin to start to understand these things. But I digress.

So the story of Adam and Eve. It is a central one. Here is when the whole thing went down. Cast out from paradise. What strikes me the most about this whole event is that God is such a patient and mercyful judge. He has given Adam the whole world, the whole cosmos, for his own enjoyment. Living in the garden and eating from the Tree of Life (tree #1) Adam and Eve are able to live forever without fear of death or worldly toil. This is a state of innocence. They are like children, they do not know evil, they could not know it, because they live with God, they are in His presence, and evil is a lack of God, a lack of the light. It would be like looking for a shadow on the surface of the sun.

But God gives them a choice. He tells them of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (tree #2). He warns them not to eat from it, lest they want the titular knowledge. To me, this is direct confirmation of Free Will in the Christian cosmology. God is giving Adam a choice here. Yes, we can admit that on some level, God already knows what Adam is going to do, but he allows him to do it anyways. What other path should God have taken here? If he knew Adam was going to damn himself, should he have not allowed him the taste of that fruit at all? Just as well, God alerts Adam to the dangers of the fruit beforehand, making him aware of the consequences. This is a crucial part of justice. Adam cannot be held responsible if he does not know the dangers of taking the fruit. But he does. Competence is established. Adam was aware of the choice, and knew it was his to make, that he had the agency to choose whether to obey the law or not, and what the consequences could be, and he did it anyways.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that he was not alone. The entire sequence of events kicks off with Eve being told about the fruit by the serpent. She brings up the consequences, demonstrating that all of Adam (even his rib, located near his heart) is aware of the consequences even before the serpent convinces them otherwise. The promise is that they will "be like the gods" and indeed, Satan often uses a hint of Christian truth, twisting it with lies for his own purposes. They were already like God, Adam being made in the image of, and therein lies Adam's mistake, thinking of himself as lesser, when God has created all of the world for his dominance.

They eat the fruit and soon have their first meta realization, that they are "naked", and they clothe themselves with leaves from the fig bush to hide their nakedness from God (tree #3). After they do this, God is hear walking through Paradise and saying "Adam, where are you?". Only recently upon reading this passage, it hit me like a ton of bricks, and I got the metaphysical spiritual meaning here. God knows where Adam is, of course, he knows everything. He knew he was going to eat the apple, he is demonstrating that here, almost in a meta Bugs Bunny Turning To the Camera And Winking way. Adam and Eve now have this kind of self awareness, which is form of knowledge of good and evil. Previously they were unaware of any lack of good. If they looked into a mirror, they would only see the good parts of their face, they would think of utmost beauty, and any flaws would be simply not perceived. But now they had eaten the fruit, they were aware of their bodily "flaws", aware of evil thoughts for the first time, and they judged God's own creation as evil and something to cover up. 

Adam quickly blames Eve, the humor of which kind of really hit me as funny this time around, almost as if the writers of the Bible were subverting tropes 2000 years ago, showing the male hero as failing and cowardly blaming his problems on others, in this case, someone that he should see as literally part of himself. The fact is, Adam is a man, and this is what men (and women, as we soon see) do, we blame our failings on others when we are caught, do we not? Eve of course blames the serpent who told her, and the symbolism here is quite interesting, the snake around the tree, the tree itself being separated in two, a Good side and an Evil side. This is different from the Tree of Life, a tree which is at the highest holy point of the garden, that nearest to God, which bears fruit that lets one live forever. Tree 2 is split into a dichotomy of good and evil, and this is what Adam/Eve have purchased with their decision to eat the fruit. This knowledge is of death, which is something that perhaps they would have had to deal with if not for the Tree of Life, which is now off limits to the condemned sinners. Theologians differ on this point, whether or not there was death before The Fall, whether or not Adam and Eve or indeed all the animals and plants lived forever in the garden. I feel like no, it was the Tree of Life magical God fruit, and they were just living in innocence not knowing that death was always one wrong decision away.

They are cast out of Eden and have to make their way past the fourth tree, the bush of thorns, which encircles the Garden and protects it from the wilderness outside, where Adam/Eve are made to toil the rest of their days, and to die and reproduce, and sweat and labor for their food. It is in many ways a casting out of The King, Adam and Eve as King and Queen of heaven, granted ultimate authority, and they chose to abdicate it, all for the promise of more power. This is a pattern we see repeated across the Bible and history. The promise of more, especially the promise of technology, can lead to some horrible, evil circumstances. The 20th century providing world-ending examples like nuclear annihiliation and global p14ndemics. The pursuit of knowledge at the cost of one's own life, this is what technology offers. Apple named it's company after the fruit of this tree, and like the hippie hypocrite John Lennon who he worshipped, Steve Jobs failed to see the evil consequences of his own soft good totalitarianism.

Luckily, the Christian God is not a totalitarian. He believes in freedom of choice. The techno utopianists would have us raise cloned soothsayers to predict the mind crimes of thought fugitives and punish them in very real, very insane ways for things they have never even done. By contrast, the Christian God does not merely evaporate Adam and Eve in a puff of smoke the moment they eat the Apple. He does not even send a cherubim with a flaming sword turning every which way to find them (this comes after they fuck up!). He is mercyful and patient. He lets them explain themelves. He gives them the consequences ahead of time. All of this demonstrates a fairness of judgement in my eyes, and one that is very in line with the ideal system of the country I was born in. Of course, all nations are manmade institutions, and prone to the very same lack of judgement Adam demonstrated when he made that fatal choice. 

Thank God, ours is a mercyful judge.

posted by Adam  # 3:11:00 PM 0 Comments