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.How could this life of baresubsistence be reconciled with any sort of benign God?One solution was to make him a capricious and unpredictable parent.Thisrole is played out with great dramatic conviction in the Book of Genesis,which spends far more time over the fall of Adam and Eve than on theircreation.The first man and woman are the ultimate bad children.The sin they commitis to disobey God's dictum not to eat of the tree of knowledge.If weexamine this act in symbolic terms, we see a father who is jealous of hisadult prerogatives: he knows best, he holds the power, his word is law.Tomaintain this position, it is necessary that the children remain children,yet they yearn to grow up and have the same knowledge possessed by thefather.Usually that is permissible, but God is the only father who wasnever a child himself.This makes him all the more unsympathetic, for hisanger against Adam and Eve is irrational in its harshness.Here is hiscondemnation of Eve:I will increase your labor and your groaning,and in labor shall you bear children.You shall be eager for your husband,and he shall be your master.Eve has such a reputation as temptress that we forget one thing—she is notovertly sexual until God makes her so.Being "eager for your husband" ispart of the curse, as is the pain of giving birth.The rest of family lifewill have to bear the sentence pronounced upon God's son:With labor shall you win your food from the earthall the days of your life.It will grow thorns and thistles for you,none but wild plants for you to eat.You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow,until you return to the ground;for from it you were taken.Dust you are, to dust shall you return.This entire scene, which ends with Adam and Eve driven in shame fromparadise, also divides a family, shattering the intimacy of the precedingdays, when God would walk in Eden and enjoy himself with his children.Butif paradise quickly turned into a faded dream—we are not far from the timewhen Cain kills his brother Abel—the lesson sank deep: humans are guilty.They alone made the world harsh and difficult; on their heads falls theblame for the agony of childbirth and the backbreaking toil of eking out aliving.The Genesis story came about two thousand years before Christ and waswritten in final form by temple scribes, perhaps a thousand years after itoriginated.Women had been subjugated to men long before that, and therigors of farming and childbearing are as old as humankind.So to arriveat the God of stage one, it was necessary to argue back from what alreadyexisted.When they asked, "Who am I?" the earliest writers of scripture knew thatthey were mortals subject to disease and famine.They had seen a hugepercentage of babies die at birth, and many times their mothers perishedas well.These conditions had to have a reason; therefore the familyrelationship with God got worked out in terms of sin, disobedience, andignorance.Even so, God remained on the scene—he watches over Adam andEve, despite the curse put upon them, and after a while he finds enoughvirtue in their descendant Noah to save him from the sentence of deathplaced upon every other offspring from the original seed family.Another irony is at work here, however.The only character in the episodeof Eve and the apple who seems to tell the truth is the serpent.Hewhispers in Eve's ear that God has forbidden them to eat of the tree ofgood and evil because it will give them knowledge and make them equal tothe father.Here are his exact words after Eve informs him that if theyeat of the forbidden fruit, they will die:Of course you will not die.God knows that as soon as you eat it, youreyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing both good and evil.The serpent is holding out a world of awareness, independence, anddecision making.All these things follow when you have knowledge.In otherwords, the serpent is advising God's children to grow up, and of coursethis is a temptation they cannot resist.Who could? (The famed authorityon myth, Joseph Campbell, points out that at this time the wanderingHebrew tribes had moved into a territory where the prevailing religion wasbased on a wise, benign goddess of agriculture whose totem animal was thesnake.In a complete reversal, the priests of Israel made the female thevillain of the piece and her ally a wicked serpent.)Why would God want to oppose such a natural development in hischildren—why didn't he want them to have knowledge? He acts like the worstof abusive fathers, using fear and terror to keep his offspring in aninfantile state.They never know when he will punish them next—worse thanthat, he gives no hope that the original curse will ever be removed.Goodand bad actions are weighed, reward and punishment are handed out from thejudge's bench, yet mankind cannot escape the burden of guilt, no matterhow much virtue your life demonstrates.Rather than viewing the God of stage one harshly, we need to realize howrealistic he is.Life has been incredibly hard for many people, and deeppsychological wounds are inflicted in family life.We all carry aroundmemories of how difficult it was to grow up and at any given moment, wefeel the tug of old, childish fears.The survivalist and the guilty childlurk just beneath the surface.The God of stage one salves these woundsand gives us a reason to believe that we will survive.At the same time hefuels our needs.As long as we need a protector, we will cling to the roleof children.How do I fit in?.I cope.In stage one there is no indication that humans have a favored place inthe cosmos—on the contrary.Natural forces are blind, and their power isbeyond our control.Recently I saw a news report about a small town inArkansas flattened by a tornado that struck in the middle of the night.Those who had survived were awakened by a deafening roar in the darknessand had the presence of mind to run into their basements.As they surveyedthe wreckage of their lives, the dazed survivors mumbled the sameresponse: I'm alive only by the grace of God
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