It occurs to me that my interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve in part 1 could be seen as less-than-generous. I would contend that the standard reading of the story is far too generous. It emphasizes the “blind” part of faith—the idea that you should mindlessly obey God, even when His orders are irrational. (Ditto for the story of Abraham, in which God pulls the same stunt of asking for something unreasonable to test faith but pulls his punch at the end.) Is there ever a reason given as to why God doesn’t want Adam and Eve to eat the fruit? It doesn’t kill them like He says it will. They lose their innocence, but is losing your innocence necessarily a bad thing or something inevitable about human nature we should accept and not fear? This story incentivizes the wrong elements of faith.The story of Adam and Eve and Original Sin is read too often as the story of the fall of man from God’s good grace. But were his good graces even something we wanted, at that high a price? I’m reminded of the Bush Administration, and the idea that we had to sacrifice some of our privacy to ensure our safety. We didn’t.
So I’m troubled by this epigraph, and not sure what it is supposed to mean, if it is supposed to mean anything.
4 comments:
it's twilight, none of it means anything. it's all just a big fluff story with no literary substance at all
save yourself while you still can
Hello, blog post from last year:
I believe he kicks them out of Eden because he doesn't want them to eat from the Tree of Life as well, because if they lost both their ignorance and their mortality they would be too similar to God/angels.
It is a dick move.
Hey, we all come to Twilight at different times. Pay no attention to the publication date of these posts... S. Meyer's prose something something timeless.
that god sounds like a jerk, just saying.
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