Oh! Oh! As long as we are pretending, let's (for arguments sake, of course) pretend that EVERY religion is right, and try to find a way to make that story plausible! For arguments, sake, of course.

And ... arguments you will have!

Snakes are awesomeness!!!!! I would have definitely listened to the snake too!!!

You have to try to think more like a Christian or Gnostic Christian to understand Eden.

You see evil and failure while not understanding why Christians sing of Adam's sin as a happy fault and necessary to God's plan.

I am my God, but recognize that nature rules me and she also recognizes that the evil men do when competing and creating victims, is a small evil when compared to the price of ending our evolution by not competing.

If any of that makes sense to you, here is a TLDR

Eve was correct in eating of the tree of knowledge and rejecting God.

It was God's plan from the beginning to have Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. This can be demonstrated by the fact that the bible says that Jesus "was crucified from the foundations of the Earth," that is to say, God planned to crucify Jesus as atonement for sin before he even created human beings or God damned sin.

1Peter 1:20 0 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.

This indicates that Jesus had no choice.

If God had not intended humans to sin from the beginning, why did he build into the Creation this "solution" for sin? Why create a solution for a problem you do not anticipate?

God knew that the moment he said "don't eat from that tree," the die was cast. The eating was inevitable. Eve was merely following the plan.

This then begs the question.

What kind of God would plan and execute the murder of his own son when there was absolutely no need to?

Only an insane and immoral God. That’s who.

The cornerstone of Christianity is human sacrifice, thus showing it‘s immorality.

One of Christianity's highest form of immorality is what they have done to women. They have denied them equality and subjugated them to men.

Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by whipping out their favorite "free will!", or “ it’s all man’s fault”.

That is "God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy."

But this simply avoids God's culpability as the author of Human Nature. Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.

If all sin by nature, then the sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not sin. That being the case, for God to punish us for following the instincts and natures he put in us would be quite wrong.

Psalm 51:5 "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."

Having said the above for the God that I do not believe in, I am a Gnostic Christian naturalist, let me tell you that evil is all human generated. Evil is our responsibility.

Much has been written to explain what I see as a natural part of evolution.

Consider.
First, let us eliminate what some see as evil. Natural disasters. These are unthinking occurrences and are neither good nor evil. There is no intent to do evil even as victims are created.

Evil then is only human to human.
As evolving creatures, all we ever do, and ever can do, is compete or cooperate.
Cooperation we would see as good as there are no victims created. Competition would be seen as evil as it creates a victim. We all are either cooperating, doing good, or competing, doing evil at all times.

Without us doing some of both, we would likely go extinct.

This, to me, explains why there is evil in the world quite well.

Be you a believer in nature, evolution or God, we should all see that what Christians see as something to blame, evil, we should see that what we have, competition, deserves a huge thanks for being available to us.

There is no conflict between nature and God on this issue. This is how things are and should be. We all must do what some will think is evil as we compete and create losers to this competition.

Regards
DL

Evolutionary theology.

All that stuff with the mud man and rib girl happens in chapter 2 of Genesis. Chapter One is even more nuts by claiming everything sprung up in 6 days, male and female of all sorts, including human men and women. PLUS, the claim is everything is good, great even so God takes 5 and has a rest up.
It's not even a very good creation myth, other cultures have way better ones, IMHO.

It is interesting to read the Genesis account with a true literary scholar such as Mauro Biglano giving you the Leningrad Codex literal Hebrew translation. Everything you thought you knew about the Adam & Eve story may just shift quite a bit considering that the typical KJV translation tends to mislead you in so many ways. When I was investigating my own religion on my path to Agnosticism, this type of study along with many other eye opening bible topics, helped me realize just how many lies and deceptions are in most (if not all) forms of organized religions. Once you see it...you just cannot unsee it! Check out Mauro Biglano on youtube and discover how following the literal words of the bible paint a very bright picture of ancient aliens seeding the planet....and how God/Elohim's glory wasn't his countenance but his floating vehicle. You can't make this stuff up.....

Here is a twist I bet nobody has thought about...according to "The BIBBLE"...God created Adam out of sand...he THEN took one of ADAMS RIBS and created EVE(follow the DNA with me for a second)...SOOOO...he CLONED ADAM and gave the CLONE a TWIST...therefore Adam and Eve are TECHNICALLY CLOSER BLOOD RELATION than BROTHER AND SISTER...this is the EPITOME of "The BIBBLES" OBSESSION WITH INCEST. I will let myself out.

For the record, nowhere does it say that the serpent is the devil. It is merely a talking serpent. One more item for the plausibility meter.

I don't think it happened either, but I don't know that I'd call the Eden story fiction. If it is, it's not the same kind of thing that our modern novelists write; it's a kind of fiction called myth. And to look at myth the way you'd read Austen or Dostoevsky or someone like that may not be the most interesting way to go. (Although it can be interesting to look at fiction with an eye to how myth has survived in that form.) A myth might be a story that tells a universal human truth, assuming there is such a thing, in a symbolic or allegorical way. As such, myths tend to appear and reappear, with different names and faces, in places separated by large expanses of space and time.

What follows is a bit of self-plagiarization from something I wrote and posted here a little while back: What Milton--himself a Christian-- understood and most Christians do not is that the Fall had to happen: the primal couple had to eat the fruit because it is knowledge that enabled humanity—or, in fact, a breed or breeds of primates—to become human. In these connections it is unsurprising that know-nothing anti-intellectualism, at least in these disunited States, almost always dresses itself up as Christianity.

Nothing but a vast tissue of lies.