Adam

[biomystic]

(02-25-2010 02:30 PM)jwitness Wrote:  Genesis 2:16,17 – “Jehovah God also laid this command upon the man: ‘From every tree of the garden you may eat to satisfaction. But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will positively die.” It was not God’s purpose for man someday to die. God warned about the course that would lead to death. Death was to be punishment for disobedience, not the doorway to a better life in heaven.

Some punishment:



"So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years and he died." Genesis 5:5

I rather think if anyone lived almost a thousand years they'd have become so bored with life and seeing people dealing with the same old problems over and over again that they'd welcome death. So, this too was a phony threat of Yahweh's to keep subjects in line.

Gnostics called Yahweh, the Blind god, Samael, because he didn't even know where Adam was in the Garden: "Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, 'Where are you?" -Gen 3:9
Does that sound like an omniscient God to you?

And really, if the serpent was wrong to tell Eve that she would not die if she ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, then the work of Jesus Christ was in vain who reestablished the knowledge of eternal life for human beings. Serpents symbolized the resurrection of life as well as wisdom for the ancients because when a snake sheds its skin it comes out looking like a brand new snake. Perhaps this is why there were two very early Gnostic sects who identified themselves with serpents.

"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up."--Jn 3:14

[clarence clutterbuck]

Parousia Wrote:Which leads to yet another interesting question: What about aliens?

That is an interesting question. What if there are aliens, and what if they do have a conception of a God, but it is nothing like the God that enthuses our planet's believers. These life forms might be giant luminescent floating plaques, drifting about on the liquid surface of a giant watery exoplanet, orbiting a red giant star in a far flung galaxy. They may have their own religious myths, of how their supreme being Shlobalop, once sent down his hermaphroditic blob of slime offspring Globalop to slop about on the surface of their world preaching the universal altruistic common interestedness of all loosely aggregated multicellular organisms, only for him/her/it to be vilified, rejected and eventually absorbed by a militant gang of dissident pond life..

Coming back to terra firma, another aspect of the Adam and Eve myth that interests me is the question of did Adam's sin set in motion a generalized human propensity towards bad behaviour that didn't figure in God's original intentions? I'm talking about the dark side of human nature that both appals and fascinates, and provides material that fuels many of the most popular and critically acclaimed dramatic productions in the theatrical and film worlds. One thinks of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Godfather Trilogy and Goodfellas to name but a few examples.

Was God's original plan that humans would resemble the kind of spookily wholesome, lobotomised, blissed out, grinning drones that figure in JW pamphlets depicting life on the remade earth? If so, and these hypothetical people ever got round to inventing television, what would be the implications for the quality of theatrical and TV drama?

One imagines the programmes would have all the dramatic interest of viewing an episode of the Teletubbies

[biomystic]

Getting back to Adam and Eve and Yahweh's dislike of snakes-- Ancient Jews put most any pagan religious practice on their [censored] list that they couldn't incorporate into their own religious belief system like they did with Egyptian circumcision but not Egyptian snake reverence--see the Egyptian pharaohs and gods and goddesses headgear with their cobra heads. Genesis Adam and Eve story where the snake is made a scapegoat is a bothersome ethnic phobia that is probably responsible for gazillions of needlessly killed snakes by Abrahamic believers made fearful of them through religious dogmas. I was a snake boy as a kid, collected and kept for a few days and then released lot's of snakes, they fascinated me. Even had a rattlesnake (a small Panamint 18 inch rattler) which my carpenter father made a very secure box cage for but still he worried so I gave the snake to our high school biology class where our teacher had a peculiar sense of humor I guess and put the little rattler in with its arch enemy, a king snake. They got along fine until one day the rattler mysteriously disappeared and there was no tell-tale bulge in the king snake. Somebody had let the rattler loose at school! It was never found. True story. Had a boa constrictor once too but it got too mean when I gave it freedom to roam all over the apt and I had to let it go in the UCLA botanical gardens where it grew up to hang from overhead tree limbs and plop down on unsuspecting co-eds. Not a true story but close..

[Mr Cheese]

I think the teletubbies do epitomize eden...very good

The eden story of course can be seen in many ways...
Some even through spiritual practises return to eden...

[Raphael]

(02-25-2010 05:08 PM)biomystic Wrote:  "So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years and he died." Genesis 5:5

I rather think if anyone lived almost a thousand years they'd have become so bored with life and seeing people dealing with the same old problems over and over again that they'd welcome death. So, this too was a phony threat of Yahweh's to keep subjects in line.

Gnostics called Yahweh, the Blind god, Samael, because he didn't even know where Adam was in the Garden: "Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, 'Where are you?" -Gen 3:9
Does that sound like an omniscient God to you?

And really, if the serpent was wrong to tell Eve that she would not die if she ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, then the work of Jesus Christ was in vain who reestablished the knowledge of eternal life for human beings. Serpents symbolized the resurrection of life as well as wisdom for the ancients because when a snake sheds its skin it comes out looking like a brand new snake. Perhaps this is why there were two very early Gnostic sects who identified themselves with serpents.

"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up."--Jn 3:14

I love how you blend all the christian + gnostic blah blah together.
when are you going to start playing 'the numbers' into the equation?

i.e. Seth was born when Adam was 130 (13 maybe?) and Adam lived another 800 years which reduces to 8? 8 = infinity symbol?
13 is connected to the MOON ya know, and knowing about the MOON is important when making an accurate calender...like the Maya?

namaste

geneSiS 5:5?
sorry all I see is SS or S:S

[Mr Cheese]

(02-26-2010 11:10 AM)Raphael Wrote:  I love how you blend all the christian + gnostic blah blah together.
when are you going to start playing 'the numbers' into the equation?

i.e. Seth was born when Adam was 130 (13 maybe?) and Adam lived another 800 years which reduces to 8? 8 = infinity symbol?
13 is connected to the MOON ya know, and knowing about the MOON is important when making an accurate calender...like the Maya?

namaste

geneSiS 5:5?
sorry all I see is SS or S:S

Good one you cant have your cake and eat it...

You are either drawing from Gnostic views or you arent...
As you rightly point out, mixing Gnostic views of the Eden tale and then turning around and incorporating those which you opposed in the first place is rather ludicrious

The classical gnostics of course liked to turn things on their head, and smash things down. Much like the Buddhists do. Although I know Biomystic thinks Buddhism is a lot of hogwash. However the idea was that through tearing down conventions and smashing things apart, it forced a person to THINK. It was about geting beyond the detritus and superflous garbage, like how big Adam's toe nails were and his age when he grew his first set of nostril hairs.

Eden then as everyone probably knows, became a tale of being trapped in a place of ignorance, by a false God. Sophia then humbled herself and acting as a syzgy (spelling nazi please) making the seprent Sophia and Christ...informed Adam and Eve they were in ignorance... thus the fall becomes an act to escape ignorance and to return to Gnosis.

Of course in the end if you compare the standard story versus the gnostic story of eden we really have the same thing. It is a story about how mankind has to return to a former state of being. or arguably it is about remebering....

But whatever your language and take, we can arguably see that the eden tale has the same "resulting pattern." We see this same patern in the life of Christ and the Buddha of course. We see this in the Western Occult story of the life of Christian Rosenkreutz. For Gnostics we see this in the apocryphal tale (used to this day in India by Christians) found in the acts of thomas, known as the Hymn of the Pearl or the Hymn of the robe of glory.

This cycle is three fold. Creation destruction redemption.
Again, depending on what tradition and what angle you are looking at, this three fold pattern is the same....For the hymn of the pearl we can summarize:

creation

A child is born into a special family

destruction
The child is restless and seeks adventure, he leaves the comfort and confines of his family. In so doing he forgets his family and who he is. He faces many trials and temptations.

Redemption

The child haing faced trials, renounced temptation...returns home with his prize. His prize is to remember who he truly is...he has gained the Pearl.

.....
"Ex Deo nascimur.

In Jesu Morimur

Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.”

We are born in God…we die in Christ and are reborn in the Holy SPirit…….

creation destruction redemption…



This is then, the story of Christ, Buddha and Christian Rosenkreutz, Aladdin and his magic lamp! and I am sure a great many others. Thus the Eden tale is far more than just a mere creation story, it is a universal motif than can be seen to be the very story of mankind itself and what we were, are and will be. Of course there are many ways to see the eden tale.

Gnostics of course tended to not take their cosmology all that seriously. They understtod that Edenic tales, such as "Hypostsis of the Archons" or "On the Origin of the World" etc were all ways of seeing things...in effect ways to understand things, not the things themselves. Gnostics tended to not be literalists. Mar Mani for example, the founder of the 1000 yr long ruinning Heresy, the Manichaeans, refused to actually commit to answering the big questions. Despite what is stated online at the likes of WIKI websites, if one digs deep enough we find that Mani had no grand plan or cosmological picture. When pressed about the nature of the Universe, what is God's nature, how many toe nails does satan have...questions such as these, Mani refused to answer. As a Gnostic Mani knew such questions were unanswerable, any answer would merely be statign the position of an opinion, a stance, a model..a cosmological map. Maps and models afterall are not the things they are portraying.

Seth of course was a rather important figure for many Gnostic groups, not just the so called Sethians.

[Raphael]

(02-26-2010 11:46 AM)Mr Cheese Wrote:  For the hymn of the pearl we can summarize:

creation

A child is born into a special family

destruction
The child is restless and seeks adventure, he leaves the comfort and confines of his family. In so doing he forgets his family and who he is. He faces many trials and temptations.

Redemption

The child haing faced trials, renounced temptation...returns home with his prize. His prize is to remember who he truly is...he has gained the Pearl.

.....

pearls of wisdom always default to the same archetypes...

like the 3 stages of Truth that correspond to your hymn of the pearl.

CREATION = TRUTH is ridiculed
DESTRUCTION = TRUTH is violently opposed
REDEMPTION = TRUTH becomes self-evident

or the 3 wishes every GENIE grants a WISHER
the first two wishes are negated by a 3rd wish.

bible babblers are slow learners.
that is obviously why they stick to the literal nonsense...putting them at odds with an archetypal world.

namaste

[kevlar]

wot the

[may]

(02-25-2010 01:56 PM)Mr Cheese Wrote:  

(02-25-2010 01:03 PM)Stereophonic Wrote:  

(02-25-2010 12:16 PM)clarence clutterbuck Wrote:  ...would God have let the world population increase to its current level with all the accompanying scientific and technological advance necessary to sustain it, or would he have sterilised everyone after a certain desired population size had been reached...

Why would God need to sterilize anyone? God already has the ability to control the number of conceptions that occur.

Besides, aren't there other planets in the universe that could be made hospitable to human life?

maybe there's goign to be another Ark...only this time..for outerspace...

the symbolic ark is taking many on board