swamidass
February 14, 2019, 5:46pm
6
Okay then. So if Adam and Eve, are, say at 12000 years ago, then outside the garden there would be minimal injustice and inequality. Poverty and slavery would not likely even exist. If we take the Genesis narrative, it would seem that Adam’s lineage influences the rise of civilization to be more unjust.
Or maybe it did. You might like this book:
Have you looked that the reading of Genesis by Ishmael , the telepathic Gorilla? This reading is surprisingly engaged with the text, and adds a new sort of weight to the fall. It seems like it might fit some of the directions you are going.
To illustrate his philosophy, Ishmael proposes a revision to the Christian myth of the Fall of Man . Ishmael’s version of why the fruit was forbidden to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is: eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil provides gods with the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die—knowledge which they need to rule the world. The fruit nourishes only the gods, though. If Adam (“humanity”) were to eat from this tree, he might think that he gained the gods’ wisdom (without this actually happening) and consequently destroy the world and himself through his arrogance. Ishmael makes the point that the myth of the Fall, which the Takers have adopted as their own, was in fact developed by Leavers to explain the origin of the Takers. If it were of Taker origin, the story would be of liberating progress instead of a sinful fall.
Ishmael and his student go on to discuss how, for the ancient herders among whom the tale originated, the Biblical story of Cain killing Abel symbolizes the Leaver being killed off and their lands taken so that it could be put under cultivation.[9] These ancient herders realized that the Takers were acting as if they were gods themselves, with all the wisdom of what is good and evil and how to rule the world: agriculture is, in fact, an attempt to more greatly create and control life, a power that only gods can hold, not humans. To begin discerning the Leavers’ story, Ishmael proposes to his student a hypothesis: the Takers’ Agricultural Revolution was a revolution in trying to strenuously and destructively live above the laws of nature, against the Leavers’ more ecologically peaceful story of living by the laws of nature.
The Takers, by practicing their uniquely envisioned form of agriculture (dubbed by Quinn “totalitarian agriculture ” in a later book ) produce enormous food surpluses, which consequently yields an ever-increasing population ,