Question about the story of Adam and Eve and death...

[Million Dollar Man]

OK this is a question that always made me think.

The story goes that because Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit
they would grow old and die right? The humans sinned.

OK so then why do animals and trees get old and die?
Well Trees live longer than Humans and most animals but still.

ALSO I noticed a lot of my books over the year..
get old and fall apart. Did they also sin?

Not trying to be smart here.. just honestly wondering this.

Then there is the theory that the DNA was changed and that's why we get old and die.
Science has not proved that it's the damaged DNA that makes us age...

But then again a Book it not alive and does not have DNA..
so how does it get old and fall apart ?

Any good answers to this would be just great thank you!

And no doubt I believe in God and most everything in the bible.
But this is just a question that always made me think...

[Albalida]

Originally Posted by Million Dollar Man

Then there is the theory that the DNA was changed and that's why we get old and die.
Science has not proved that it's the damaged DNA that makes us age...

The going theory as I understood it was that every time a cell divides, something about the telomerese substrate in each of the daughter cells is different from the parent cells, which is correlated to aging. Aging might cause telomerese to lessen, or less telomerese might cause aging.

But then again a Book it not alive and does not have DNA..
so how does it get old and fall apart ?

It could be the atoms on the page and spine get moved around so much when you use them that they wear out, they get mold growing on them sometimes, but usually it's oxidization. Eventually it might even be the atoms' half lives cause it to decay.

Any good answers to this would be just great thank you! And no doubt I believe in God and most everything in the bible.

How literally, though? The genesis story leaves a lot of practical questions open, but no interpretation outside of the given text can really be trusted (if you, like me, buy into the Jacques Derrida's philosophy of literary criticism.) It might well be surrendered as a mystery of the faith.

[Cheese Consumer]

That story is a cutesy way of describing the original descent from higher mind control to reactive/subconscious control as part of the bigger process.

Humans can live for a very long time and if I remember back to primary school and hearing stories from an old book about people living for more than 400 years- our ancestors quite possibly did. What ages us is our inability to recreate what is lost and so eventually the balance of creation vs destruction within our bodies goes into terminal decline.

Inanimate objects are unable to repair themselves and begin the decline process from day one. We are different- our bodies repair and replace themselves constantly. When our mind is not functioning well we lose the ability to perpetuate the repair cycle and become more inanimate. The majority of modern lifestyle illnesses including all mental health "disorders" and "syndromes" as well as secondary physical ailments such as obesity, diabetes, cancers and so on are caused by the subconscious/reactive mind being unable to properly manage the human being. When our mind works to its full capacity then our ongoing internal repair process can carry out its work. And we can again live a very long time.

It has nothing to do with fear, guilt, shame or any of the standard tools of the reactive mind that are used every day to control people. These are just how reactively-driven people over thousands of years have repeated and personalized the stories. Humans had to go through this part of our existence- descend into chaos for quite a few millennia and then wake ourselves out of it to return to the enlightened state with full knowledge of why it all happened and how we can best avoid it ever happening again.

You may even find that all those stories about Jesus returning to earth relate to the end of the 'endarkenment' phase of human existence and the return to the enlightened state. You can't tell unenlightened people about this though, they instinctively react to it. This is the ultimate conundrum.

CC

[ButterflyWoman]

It's a creation myth. There are lots of them in the world, and many from the Ancient Near East, including the one in the bible.

What's it trying to say? It's a creation myth. It's giving a story of "how things came to be the way they are" (specifically tailored to the people by and for whom it was constructed, the ancient Israelites). In this case, it's explaining why people get old and die, why they have to work the land to survive, why patriarchy was the norm, and why women were subjugated.

Creation myth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Creation Myths - Usbible.com

[desertrat]

The way I see this is control. The church makes sex a sin . desert rat

[joelr]

Exactly, it's just a creation myth, it's not a record of literal events. It's not original to the Old Testament at all. The earliest record of the Eden mythology, complete with the serpent and the forbidden fruit is from an ancient tribe in Africa. Joseph Campbell speaks of it in The Power of Myth series.

Growing up in a mostly Christian culture most information like that is swept under the rug so folks can go on believing that the Bible is the beginning of all those myths.

[larkok]

If you want to somewhat take the Adam/Eve story literally, a suggestion would be to consider a metaphor. Adam/Eve = Spirit, Apple (wisdom) = physical state.

In effect, spirit was made flesh and thus was prone to decay. I would hazard to guess that those two spirits wanted to be born in flesh, and the apple was a catalyst for it to happen.

[ButterflyWoman]

In fact, there are not one but two creation stories in the bible, both in Genesis. And they conflict with each other in a couple of places. There is the first story in Chapter 1, which is more of a poetic form, and then the second version, most likely the religious-leader-approved version.

[Million Dollar Man]

Yes perhaps just a Myth...

But one way people try to see it..
it that humans were able to live forever...
with perfect DNA... if DNA never gets damaged.. then you never age..
or die....

Now science has proved this..and they are working on ways..
to perfect the DNA...

Could the story somehow be a myth.. saying
in other words our DNA... was tampered with..
by evil beings??

I'm not sure.. but it's interesting to see all the possibilities..

[ButterflyWoman]

Some myths do intend to convey deeper truths, at least, as the people of the day and culture could receive them. Myth is not the same as "lie" or "fiction". Myth is a deep part of the human experience, and, I personally feel, a reflection of the collection unconscious.

For example, in the biblical creation myth, it states that man was made from the earth, that is, dirt, mud, whatever. It turns out that the composition of the human body is basically a microcosm of the same elements and in the same general proportions as that which is found in the earth's crust (or so I recall from some long-ago biology class ). In that sense, and in a more metaphorical sense, i.e., humans were formed as part of and because of the environment of the earth, it's certainly not without some degree of primary truth.

Frankly, I've puzzled over the Genesis creation story/stories for decades and I still don't entirely understand it. Some of the symbolism is, no doubt, lost to us now. The ancient Israelites would have understood the symbols perfectly, but their culture is long gone (much was destroyed during the Babylonian exile), so we can only guess.

I haven't actually done much direct scholarly work on the biblical creation story, though (I could tell you a lot more about some other aspects of the Old Testament). I have done some study on creation myths, in general.

One thing that is interesting to note is that the serpent was associated with "female wisdom" in most Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. With the prominent featuring of a serpent in the story, it opens up interesting vistas for interpretation.

[ChannelingMyself]

I really don't believe in the biblical creation stories anymore but when I used to be religious I posed that same question to someone. I think the answer I got was that animals were never meant to have eternal life to begin with. Since the animals did die Adam and Eve were able to understand what death was since they saw the animals dying.