Jeremy Christian's Take on Adam

@Jeremy_Christian seems to be an avid reader and deeply engaged in this conversation. For now, I suggest giving up trying to extract a story that you will find coherent @John_Harshman. Give him some time to process what he is seeing here. Hopefully he will learn a lot from participating in conversations here, at least in how to better communicate his position. Perhaps if you pick it up in a month or so it might be easier to move forward.

This falls right into the gap where discussions about people with /without souls or people with /without the image of God are had on this site in regards to what makes Adam significant if not the first human.

This is the answer.

This is not the only approach. Also your use of the phrase “free will” is confusing.

I’m not sure what you find confusing. Free will has long been a Theological concept central to many religions, including Christianity. Augustine wrote a whole book on the topic. So what exactly is confusing about my use of that term?

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As @John_Harshman aptly puts it, your particular usage is “idiosyncratic.” Do you know what we mean by this?

I know what it means, but am not sure how my use of the term is different than anyone else’s.

It’s freedom to choose your own actions, right?

It’s what makes us capable of evil, right?

The opposite of deterministic, right?

What am I missing?

What’s idiosyncratic about my particular use?

Grnesis 1:28 - Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Homo sapiens did not have free will before Adam. This is why they did exactly as God commanded. They filled the Earth and established themselves as the dominant species in the animal kingdom.

Adam and Eve did not do what God commanded. They chose of their own volition to do what they wanted. That’s free will. Everyone “of Eve” has free will.

There is a definite point when human behavior changed from their natural mode of operation and that change originates right where /when Genesis is set.

OK @Jeremy_Christian - I’ve done a piece on The Hump responding in greater depth to your topic of civilized v primtive cultures. Here.

Thank you for this, @jongarvey. This is a good read and gives me a better understanding of your viewpoint. It shows me that you’re familiar and have read quite a lot on the same topics I have. It’s cool to get to speak about these things with someone who’s so informed and familiar.

You - “He makes much of God’s inability to do anything to control free-will, because it is an absolutely independent power… a view all too prevalent today, as I have often explored before, but not actually what is taught either by the Bible or by the better theologians down the centuries.”

I disagree with your comment here that this isn’t taught by the Bible. I don’t see how this element of the story can be missed or misconstrued. It’s a central element to a good portion of the story being told.

The Adam/Eve garden story demonstrates it directly. The story of the Israelites in the wilderness mirrors that story in that it begins with them receiving laws/commandments, then describes their constant disobedience afterwards. Laws are only necessary where the ability/tendency to break them exists. And punishment is carried out, like parents with their children, in an attempt to correct behavior. The story of the bible is not a story of a God in full control of everything.

You - “If your primitive Hottentot manages to retire from the Human Zoo or Barnum’s circus and produce children, a generation of assimilation into Western culture will make them intellectually and spiritually indistinguishable from the mass, albeit certain genetic traits may well be more or less common amongst them.”

Your assuming that I’m claiming they’re “lesser” in some way. That we’re “better”. That my claim is that they’re something less than full human. I have said many times that I am not saying they are less capable. They’re fully capable. I’ve never once said or even implied that they’re in any way below us. I agree they’re fully capable. That is not what I’m claiming is different.

You - “they have lost land to commercial logging not because they lack intelligence or free will, but because they lack the tools of civilization to fight back adequately.”

And why do they lack the tools of civilization to fight back? Because they lack free will. It’s not that they were incapable of inventing and building the tools, it’s that they were never compelled to do so. Like I said before, they were perfectly capable of sitting down and designing a writing system, they just had no need for it.

Necessity is the mother of invention, but if there is no need?

Jeremy

The one clear thing I took away from your stuff was that you were not implying any inferiority. My comments were just covering the possibilities.

Whereas it’s true that bot the Eden story and that of Israel are about disobedience, it doesn’t follow that the existence of free will in them implies the lack of it before.

But whether you like it or not, the claim about (in this case) a specific Ecuador tribe, if not demeaning, is simply misrepresenting them: talking to any member of such a tribe will show they have exactly as much free-will as you or me. Less autonomous individuality, probably, but that’s a feature of modern Western civilization since the Renaissance rather than a universal.

There are tribes which have steadfastly refused to countenance contact with outsiders, even when others around have traded and even assimilated. That’s an expression of choice.

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You - “Now, there is something to be said for this, firstly in the coincidence of apparent timing and culture between the Fall narratives and the rise of politicized city states in Mesopotamia, which were accompanied by vastly greater disparities of wealth and status, organised war and institutionized brutality – as well as false religion.”

Genesis 6:11-12 - Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.

Then, after observing their building of a city and a tower from bricks they had made …
Genesis 11:6 - And the Lord said, “Behold, the people are one and they have all one language, and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be withheld from them which they have imagined to do.

You acknowledge both the rise of civilization and the increase in violence during this point in history in this specific region. Both of which were observations made of man by God in Genesis 6 and 11, but somehow see it only as a “coincidence of apparent timing”?

It says “the people on earth had corrupted their ways”. This period in history can indeed be seen as a corruption of “their ways” as this was a complete alteration of human behavior as it had been for tens of thousands of years up to that point. Both in violence as well as technological capability and action.

And the fact that in both cases it says God in response to these observations took action, first with the flood, then with the scattering, that these were developments God took issue with and that these were not common.

Joshua said something similar. That by all appearances his dog has self-awareness and free will. Please don’t take from this that I’m equating indigenous humans to dogs. I am not. This shows me a lack of understanding in your inability to identify free will or the characteristics that signify it. All living things are aware of self to some extent and can be observed making decisions based on preference or observations. Free will isn’t simply the ability to make a choice.

It’s when those choices begin to alter the common behaviors and way of existing prior (for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways). A sign of free will is the rise of civilization or the severe uptick in violence, or the large difference between two peoples of the same species as has been observed many times over between “civilized” humans and indigenous. Where each appears almost alien to the other.

Your dog having free will doesn’t refer to their ability to choose this treat over that one. Ever seen Planet of the Apes? That’s more what should be expected. A complete alteration to the behaviors commonly associated with dogs in your experience. Sure, your dog can choose a preferred toy from the toy box, but he/she still very much acts like a dog. Leave here, go to Africa or India, encounter a dog, you pretty much know what to expect. A dog.

What then is the significance of the Eden story? What was the purpose of creating a garden with one forbidden tree right in the middle? How does it not follow that this was a new capability unique to Adam?

As others have said, you’re using “free-will” in a non-standard way. Suggest reading up Augustine (or his commentators) in the first instance. Can you point me to single author who identifies “free-will” with “the ability to alter common behaviours?”

As I said before in the Romans quotation, and as much in the Bible shows, the possibility of unbelief and disobedience arises from the establishment of a relationship of faith and loyalty. And loyalty cannot exist without the possibility of disloyalty - and hence the provision of the tree of knowledge. This (at least) is given as a test - parallel and equivalent to the covenant 10 words given to Israel on Sinai. But in fact, it’s also given as the means to grow in wisdom, for “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

The most direct parallel is seen in the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, which are in several ways deliberately based on the events in the garden. From Hebrews 5, which refers to this above all the events of Jesus’s life:

During the days of Jesus’ earthly life, He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the One who could save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from what He suffered. And having been made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him…

Here you see that the ability to make choices was the same for Jesus as for Adam or anyone else. Jesus had made choices throughout his life. But, as in the garden, the particular circumstances here involved the choice willingly to obey his Father, or be diverted by Satanic temptation. The choices he made under pressure, although he was never disobedient before, are said (a) to have taught him obedience and (b) perfected him to be able to change the world according to God’s plan.

This would have been Adam’s role too, not in relation to anything special in the ability to choose, but in the obedience of the choice he made - to choose according to God’s will is freedom (Jesus being both the epitome of human freedom and the epitome of obedience to the Father). To choose against God’s will, as Adam did, is to lose true freedom and become a slave to sin.

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I have read Augustine’s book before, but it’s been a while. I will certainly revisit.

This, I feel, demands some clarification that I’m sure is going to be met with plenty of resistance. The difference here seems to be the difference between philosophy and science.

Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
Science is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat with a flashlight.

While I certainly understand and don’t begrudge yours and others reliance on the “best theologians” or other forefathers of the church and the like, there’s something significant we have that they never did. Context. An actual overall view of the historical landscape and developments happening around the events being described.

These philosophical musings, while potentially insightful or thought-provoking, can only really rely on the text as if playing out in a vacuum. The only ‘truths’ to be gleaned have no basis in the context of the environment these events are playing out in.

What I’m describing is what’s been observed in the merging of text and history. If you look to the past to find agreeance with what I’m saying you’re most likely not going to find it, not because it is wrong, but because what I’m talking about those people of the past were not privy to. They simply did not have access to the accumulated knowledge we have now.

It’s like trying to grasp the particulars of Gone with the Wind with no knowledge of the civil war. There’s much to be misunderstood or missed completely.

What I found potentially exciting about this site is that it’s populated with people willing to break away from old ways of thinking and truly re-evaluate the texts in the light of modern knowledge. This is one of my issues with organized religion. It’s the insistence to rely on the past and not embrace the progress of knowledge. This, in my opinion, arrests development. The amount of resistance I’ve been met with since was something I thought discussions here would finally be free of. Or, at least, not as hampered by.

At this point I wonder how this group ever considered alternate takes on the Adam story at all.

2 posts were split to a new topic: What a Model of Adam Noteworthy?

Jeremy, the names listed in Genesis 4, 5, 10 and 11 are the names of ruler-priests, not the first people on Earth. These are typical of ancient king lists, as are the lists of Genesis 25 and 36. All these men are of the Hebrew (Habiru/ 'Apiru) royal priest caste which practiced endogamy and had a unique marriage and ascendancy pattern.

We can’t use the numbers in Genesis to put together your time scheme as they are highly symbolic: Cain (7); Lamech the Elder (77); and Lamech the Younger (777). Paleopathology indicates that the lifespan of ancient peoples living in an area extending from the Nile and North Africa to Turkey and Mesopotamia was about 34 years. This applies to peoples in the Late Paleolithic - 30,000 to 9,000 B.C., the Mesolithic - 9,000 to 7,000 B.C. and the Early Neolithic - 7,000 to 5,000 B.C. This would apply to all the rulers listed in Genesis, although rulers tended to live longer than the average people.

Hi Alice!

See, the reservation I have with this is that I actually have. I built a framework around that time scheme and used it to predict where/when to find evidence of each event described. Nearly every time it led me right to what I was looking for.

So while I understand rationalizations built around the assumption that surely nobody actually lived 900+ led to ideas like this one about the ruler-priests and the like, I have significant amounts of empirical data that leads me to doubt that’s accurate.

Two examples of predictions made through this model that will hopefully illustrate why I’m so married to all my BS.

  1. The tower of Babel story - according to the timeline and framework I put together, I should find an event that closely resembles the Babel story happening about 1 century after the flood in southern Mesopotamia. That’s when I found the 5.9 kiloyear event (3900BC/ southern Mesopotamia) …

“It triggered human migration to the Nile, which eventually led to the emergence of the first complex, highly organized, state-level societies in the 4th millennium BC.” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5.9_kiloyear_event

  1. Behavior change that matched what’s described (this was a big one) - according to the timeline and framework, I should find a significant behavioral change that resembled what’s described in Genesis happening to Adam/Eve that began in southern Mesopotamia and spread all throughout the world from there. That’s when I found these two books describing a behavior change exactly as predicted, originating exactly where/when predicted …
  • Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World by James DeMeo
  • The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era by Steve Taylor

I would just like to say that James DeMeo is a follower of Wilhelm Reich, has drunk the Reichian Kool-ade all the way: orgone, weather control, weird theories about the nature of biological life, and so on. Nobody should attach any credence to anything in that book. Don’t know anything about Steve Taylor.

Yeah, I know. I’ve read some weird things. But I don’t doubt the evidence in the book. It’s not even so much a book as a catalog of evidence. I bought it to read it, only to find out it’s not much of a “reader”.

He equates the psychological change he’s tracking with climate change, the hardships that caused, leading to Reich’s concept of psychological “armoring” as the cause he’s postulating, but that’s not the bit that interests me. In gathering this evidence he keyed in on specific evidence that shows behavioral characteristics of various cultures and mapped these findings across a map to find where/when these ‘pockets’ could be found.

In doing so he identified a pattern that Taylor then takes the ball and runs with in some really relevatory ways. Unlike DeMeo’s book, Taylor’s book is an entertaining and fascinating read. It takes this behavior pattern and ties them all up with theological and mythological views of all these various cultures. I recommend it.

To test my timeline/framework where this behavior change was involved, I was looking at the daunting task of doing basically what he spent 8 years doing. What a relief it was to find someone already had.