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Genesis 3 -- wherein it turns out nudity is Evil
There is a lot to unpack in this third chapter of Genesis. Plus, it raises the importance of several things I hadn't paid attention to earlier. First we meet the snake, the "most cunning" of all the wild animals. And I noticed for the first time that the Bible switched from saying "God" in chapter 1, to "the Lord God" in chapter 2, after humans were created. At first God was simply eternal and omnipotent, but after she created us, she became our authority figure, our Lord, whom we disobey at our peril. The cunning snake asks Female Prime whether she can eat any fruit she wants, she replies, no not that tree over there, God says we will die if we even touch it. The snake calls God a liar, and, it seems to me at this point, God was a liar. You won't die if you eat it, but you will learn to tell the difference between Good and Evil. This, the snake says, will make humans "like gods". Pretty smart snake, eh? Snakes can talk? Who knew! The woman thought the fruit looked tasty, and she wanted to learn the difference between Good and Evil, so she ate it, and she gave some to her husband, who apparently will do anything she asks him to do no questions asked, no matter what God says. And the first thing Humans Prime learned was that nudity is Evil. So they made some underwear out of fig leaves, but this was not enough to cover all their Evil nudity, so they hid themselves from sight. God was mad! He asked Male Prime why he ate the fruit, and Male Prime blamed Female Prime. She made me do it! Bitch set me up! Female Prime blamed the snake, for "tricking" her, but there was no trickery involved, as the snake merely told her the truth. Eating the fruit was not harmful in any way. It merely opened their eyes to reality. In punishment, God does not kill the humans, instead to punish the woman he makes childbirth painful. But to make sure she must endure the pain of childbirth, he makes her horny for her husband, and he tells her she must submit to her husband anytime he asks, "he shall rule over you." Got it? Childbirth is painful because you are being punished, you are horny for your husband because you are being punished, you must let your husband fuck you whenever he wants because you are being punished. To punish the man, he sentences him to a life of farming. No more picking fruit from trees, now he must toil to grow wheat from the fields. Plus, man will be condemned to age and die someday. From dust to dust. It turns out the Garden of Eden held a Tree of Life, which confers everlasting life, but now man is banished from the Garden and will not live forever. Technically, the Fruit of Good and Evil didn't kill Humans Prime, God killed (eventually) Humans Prime by physically blocking them from eating the Fruit of Life from now on. Humans were never intrinsically immortal. ----- To me, all this sounds ridiculous. So the Garden of Eden was an eternal playground of picking fruit, hanging out naked, and fucking. Sounds great! But nudity is Evil. But the Humans Prime didn't know that nudity is evil, so it was OK for them to be naked, and to live forever fucking naked. So long as they didn't acquire knowledge of good and evil, which is godlike. Once humans became more godlike, God became mad at them, and punished them. Apparently God wanted to be the only godlike god in the universe. Nevertheless he put the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden where it was ripe for the picking. But why is nudity evil, and why didn't God want us to know this? And why was it OK for us to be evil so long as we didn't realize it? And the punishments! For women, they are cursed with painful childbirth and sexual desire (which will inevitably lead to painful childbirth, but they must have sex anyway, damn it, whenever husband wants it). For men, they are cursed with having to labor for bread, and death. In a way, this chapter explains a lot, while explaining nothing. We begin to understand why religious morality is so fucked up, without truly understanding WHY it is so fucked up.
[Previous entry: "Genesis 2 -- The origins of the Weekend, Patriarchy, Monogamous Heterosexuality, and shame-free Nudism"] [TOC] [Next entry: "Genesis 4 -- The Children Fight"]
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