It’s almost as if the priest is suggesting that God wants us uneducated to be better subservient to him, and that seeking knowledge is punishable (by death technically).

Tangentially related, but specifically the religious people who are sure that you need religion to know good from evil and act morally genuinely scare me.

They're just admitting they believe noone really tries to do the right thing for the right reasons. You know, like, these are the conventions we set so living in a society can even work. Some are coded in laws. Lots of them are implicitly agreed on.

But no, according to them instead we're supposed to do it for fear of "bad afterlife" or of a spank from sky daddy.

That tells a lot more about what "moral" means to them than anything.

The bible taken literally is madness. Even new testament. If I were to be religious, I would assume everything is a metaphor.

The gnostics figured out an explanation for this 2000 years ago.

According to them, the "God" who created the material world and is talked about in the Old Testament is an evil and/or ignorant lesser deity and that's why the world sucks.

The "real" God rules over the immaterial (souls, knowledge, and the likes) and is called "the Invisible Spirit".

Both the snake and later on Jesus were agents/emanations of this "Invisible Spirit" sent to bring knowledge ("gnosis" in Greek) to humanity in order to help them break free from the prison that is the material world.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it doesn't matter how logical and internally consistent your ideology is, the one who is more organized wins out in the end. This doesn't have anything to do with any currently ongoing political situation. 🫠

Here’s the thing that doesn’t often get noted with this story - the Serpent tells the truth. God lies. And, again, the Serpent is the bad guy?

"Genesis" is crap, start to finish.

Only in an age of no books could this religion flourish; only the Black Death broke their stranglehold of Europe.

Still tax free! So that's nice.

The apple was just sex-ed. They just over-euphemized it to make sure kids could read it, and now everyone gets confused. The apple probably wasn't an apple originally, it was probably a pomegranate, a fruit known for dripping red all over you like blood, and the woman was the one who ate it. So to remove some of the whitewashing of the story, imagine a fully naked Eve with pomegranate juice dripping all over her body, kinda paints a different picture, right?

That bonus panel has layers

He's a brave kid to turn his back to a Catholic priest

There's no apple in this story.

I’ve been saying this for years. Satan is the good guy in the Bible.

Whenever I want to get entertained, I tend to read religion Lore. Islam tends to trump it all.

Coincidentally today read this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aja%27ib_al-Makhluqat

Read the part under Celestial Cosmography.

Squint real hard and take the beginning of Genesis as a tale of solar/planetary formation followed by evolution, closest origin myth I know of.

"Let there be light." Solar ignition. Let's go!

They got the order of life mixed here and there, but at least it started in the sea. Adam and Eve's curse is by far the most interesting bit.

They eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Let's say they were apes before that event and look at the curses laid down.

• Now we know good from evil. Bit hard to argue animals are terribly moral, having a concept of good and evil. Other mammals are close, especially emotionally, but nothing like humans.

• Now our heads are swole with brains, painful childbirth follows. Don't know of any mammals that have such painful, risky births.

• We're cursed to labor all our days to bring food forth from the ground, when before we were swinging from trees, eating fruit and the occasional howler monkey baby. The invention of agriculture anyone?

• Cast out of the Garden, we can never get any of the above back.

I find it fascinating how many factual points they hit without resorting to, "Big god spooged on mountains and giants came forth and so on and so on." (Yes, I'm aware of how nuts Genesis gets down the road. I've read it a time or two.)

If you really want to confound Christians, point out there's a second creation myth 3 or 4 pages later, which disagrees with the first.

See I always thought of the apple as being like Pandora's box, to mix theologies. People were innocent and ignorant before it, living very simple, short, worry-free lives. Eve taking the apple is what opened the possibility for humanity to grow and ascribe meaning to our lives, to form societies and create great works, enabling the best of us to make and do so much more for the world but also enabling the worst of us to do far more terrible things. That's the way I always interpreted that tale, as an expansion of humanity's potential and responsibility

“But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”

― Mikhail Bakunin