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Punishment fitting the crime?
Apr. 23rd, 2015 12:54 amI think about things while waiting for stuff, and while walking places. Tonight, I was thinking about the whole Adam/Eve thing in Christianity. I could not, no matter how hard I tried, think of any way that Adam and Eve eating that forbidden fruit could, on its own, justify thousands or millions of years of dooming humanity to die short, painful, Hellish lives, and then force them to try to make up for their discretion and punishing the ones that don't live up to that with eternal literal Hell. The punishment just doesn't fit the effing crime, and if you believe the standard BS about God being omni-benevolent, that doesn't add up. Add in supposed omniscience and future-sight, and it REALLY doesn't add up. Either God knew what He was getting into, and did it anyway because He's a sadistic bastard, or God is fallible. Those are your choices: either God is evil, or He's infallible, or He's imaginary, or He's something much more limited. Because really, how do you justify punishing Adam and Eve and thousands or even millions of years of their descendants with short, Hellish lives and then eternal damnation if they don't grovel the right way just because of one tiny disobedience, beyond sadism? You can't, because there IS no justification. That punishment, for that "crime," is the most perfect example of "cruel and unusual punishment" I have ever heard of. Because yeah, one of your kids breaks one rule, and you spend thousands of years torturing (and committing genocide against) their descendants as punishment? WTF???
So I then asked myself, "Is there any situation, any situation at all, that could possibly justify the punishment God laid down on the human race in the Bible? Extra points if it includes the forbidden fruit somehow." It took me a while, but finally I came up with a possible situation. Now, this situation I came up with still requires a fallible God, a God that cannot see the future and who chooses not to read the minds of Its children at first, but this God is still a loving God, of a sort, and, well... here's the scenario:
God made the Heavens and the Earth and all that jazz. Then She made the Angels, and they were perfect. She spent a few thousand years raising Her angel children in the Garden of Eden and also in Heaven. All was well. A nice, loving family.
Then She thought, "Maybe I should give the Angels someone other than one another to play with?" And from the soil of the Earth, She made humans. Only, there was a slight flaw in humans, that She didn't notice until She had already given them life. But it was a seemingly minor flaw, a small streak of disobedience. She shrugged, and treated them no differently than She did the Angels. And maybe, just maybe, She didn't even consider it a flaw at first; maybe She thought it would make them more interesting. Hell, maybe She even did it on purpose for that very reason. Who knows?
Anyway, all was well for a while. There were a few spats between the humans and the angels, but that was to be expected of siblings. Nothing She couldn't handle. The humans multiplied, as did Angels, but there was plenty of room in Eden for both species.
One day, Adam and Eve got really bored. They had, previously, been given one rule by God: don't eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, nor of the Tree of Life. Until then, they'd been young enough to obey, but now they were rebellious teenagers, so they hopped the fence when God had Her attention elsewhere, and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And, since God was still occupied (maybe the Angels had caused a black hole to back up or something, who knows?), they got their kids to do the same.
When God was done dealing with the backed-up black hole and the subsequent mess it had caused, She noticed some of the fruits were missing, and noticed the last human child to have not gotten one of the fruits chowing down on it. Naturally, She was very cross with them, and put them all in time out for a few dozen years. But they didn't seem any different than before, so She eventually let them free in Eden again.
Well, sibling rivalry got more and more heated over the years, and the humans -- always rebellious and now knowing the difference between Good and Evil -- got more and more rebellious than ever. Fights broke out, tempers flared, the situation was devolving rapidly. And then one day, the shit REALLY hit the fan. Some of the humans tricked one of the Angels into backing-up another black hole, and when God's back was turned, they descended on the Angels en masse, ripping the Angels to shreds, killing them all... except for one. Lucifer had been the one tricked into backing up the black hole, and was busy getting the third degree from God while his brothers and sisters were being murdered.
Naturally, when God and Lucifer saw what had happened, they were... well, absolutely devastated, sorrow beyond all possible sorrows at first. Then that sorrow changed to include them being... well, I could go with "furious," "livid," "incensed," "outraged," even "massively fucking enraged," and none would do their fury any justice. Humans had committed the first ever genocide. As a result, they were cast from Eden onto Earth, they and all their descendents doomed to live short, Hellish lives on Earth, then their souls doomed to eternal damnation in the firey pits of Hell, ruled by the still-enraged Lucifer, and only by obeying every one of God's commands, and by showing one another kindness and compassion, they might, MIGHT show enough repetance for some of them to be let into Heaven again. The end.
Woah... with a crime that actually fits the punishment, I think people believing this form of Christianity might be a HELL of a lot more inclined to follow Jesus's teachings and be good people. Because it seems to me that in this version of Christianity, it's potentially several orders of magnitude harder to get into Heaven. A worldview like that, Christianity might actually have turned out the way Jesus wanted it to. And if somebody decided that this version of things made more sense, and decided to follow it, well... I wouldn't be upset by that.
So I then asked myself, "Is there any situation, any situation at all, that could possibly justify the punishment God laid down on the human race in the Bible? Extra points if it includes the forbidden fruit somehow." It took me a while, but finally I came up with a possible situation. Now, this situation I came up with still requires a fallible God, a God that cannot see the future and who chooses not to read the minds of Its children at first, but this God is still a loving God, of a sort, and, well... here's the scenario:
God made the Heavens and the Earth and all that jazz. Then She made the Angels, and they were perfect. She spent a few thousand years raising Her angel children in the Garden of Eden and also in Heaven. All was well. A nice, loving family.
Then She thought, "Maybe I should give the Angels someone other than one another to play with?" And from the soil of the Earth, She made humans. Only, there was a slight flaw in humans, that She didn't notice until She had already given them life. But it was a seemingly minor flaw, a small streak of disobedience. She shrugged, and treated them no differently than She did the Angels. And maybe, just maybe, She didn't even consider it a flaw at first; maybe She thought it would make them more interesting. Hell, maybe She even did it on purpose for that very reason. Who knows?
Anyway, all was well for a while. There were a few spats between the humans and the angels, but that was to be expected of siblings. Nothing She couldn't handle. The humans multiplied, as did Angels, but there was plenty of room in Eden for both species.
One day, Adam and Eve got really bored. They had, previously, been given one rule by God: don't eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, nor of the Tree of Life. Until then, they'd been young enough to obey, but now they were rebellious teenagers, so they hopped the fence when God had Her attention elsewhere, and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And, since God was still occupied (maybe the Angels had caused a black hole to back up or something, who knows?), they got their kids to do the same.
When God was done dealing with the backed-up black hole and the subsequent mess it had caused, She noticed some of the fruits were missing, and noticed the last human child to have not gotten one of the fruits chowing down on it. Naturally, She was very cross with them, and put them all in time out for a few dozen years. But they didn't seem any different than before, so She eventually let them free in Eden again.
Well, sibling rivalry got more and more heated over the years, and the humans -- always rebellious and now knowing the difference between Good and Evil -- got more and more rebellious than ever. Fights broke out, tempers flared, the situation was devolving rapidly. And then one day, the shit REALLY hit the fan. Some of the humans tricked one of the Angels into backing-up another black hole, and when God's back was turned, they descended on the Angels en masse, ripping the Angels to shreds, killing them all... except for one. Lucifer had been the one tricked into backing up the black hole, and was busy getting the third degree from God while his brothers and sisters were being murdered.
Naturally, when God and Lucifer saw what had happened, they were... well, absolutely devastated, sorrow beyond all possible sorrows at first. Then that sorrow changed to include them being... well, I could go with "furious," "livid," "incensed," "outraged," even "massively fucking enraged," and none would do their fury any justice. Humans had committed the first ever genocide. As a result, they were cast from Eden onto Earth, they and all their descendents doomed to live short, Hellish lives on Earth, then their souls doomed to eternal damnation in the firey pits of Hell, ruled by the still-enraged Lucifer, and only by obeying every one of God's commands, and by showing one another kindness and compassion, they might, MIGHT show enough repetance for some of them to be let into Heaven again. The end.
Woah... with a crime that actually fits the punishment, I think people believing this form of Christianity might be a HELL of a lot more inclined to follow Jesus's teachings and be good people. Because it seems to me that in this version of Christianity, it's potentially several orders of magnitude harder to get into Heaven. A worldview like that, Christianity might actually have turned out the way Jesus wanted it to. And if somebody decided that this version of things made more sense, and decided to follow it, well... I wouldn't be upset by that.
