God And The Serpent

If God is omniscient re past / present / future, why did He create the serpent and put it in the Garden of Eden?

Even if we’re reading the story on purely symbolic terms, it means He knew He was putting something into motion that would have horrible results for untold generations of innocent people.

If you invite a child molester into your house but you don’t know he’s a child molester and he rapes your child, you can at least say you weren’t aware of the potential danger when you invited him in.

But if you know he’s a child molester and you deliberately turn your back so he can rape your child…

…that’s evil.

And if you actively recruit him to come into your house to rape your child, and then blame your child for what happened…

Ergo, we are faced with the following possibilites:

(1)  God, despite His claims, is not omniscient, and hence unworthy of worship

(2)  God is deliberately malicious and tormenting us for His sadistic pleasure, and hence unworthy of worship

...or perhaps…

(3)  The people who first told the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent and the Garden of Eden got it all wrong.

Every bit of it.

They’re not to blame.

They didn’t act maliciously.

They weren’t stupid.

But their understanding of human nature and the world around them and how things work was limited.

They put together what they knew in a way that made sense to them, even though we see they possessed a terribly limited if not hideously deformed point of view.

We know better.

Even before Jesus, there was a strain of Jewish theological thought typified by Rabbi Hillel that recognized the problem was not “sin” or “evil” or “Satan” but a lack of love for our fellow human beings.

For those of you saying “but what about the commandment to love God?” the answer stares you right in the face:  There’s nothing we can do for God that He can’t do for himself except to honor Him voluntarily and consciously changing our own hearts and behavior so that we treat others justly and compassionately as He wants us to.

The only true religion is loving one another.

It’s all b.s. if we don’t.

And God will forgive all else if we do.

© Buzz Dixon