davus224

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about consciousness and the nature of "being," and every time I think I am getting somewhere, I am led back to the fall of man and I hit a wall. What was the fall of man, and why did it occur?

(I'm gonna try to work this out cohesively...forgive me if I fail)

A lion hunts and kills and eats and sleeps because he is governed by an internal force that tells him that this is what he needs to do. He does not question why he does these things - but he does them anyway. We agree that this is instinct. I have become more and more convinced that Instinct is the closest to God we will ever be. It is a governing force that causes us to act in order to sustain life. Now lets look at the fall of man.

"...their eyes were opened..." the Bible says. I think we can interpret this to mean that mankind reached a point at which it was able to look objectively at his instincts. When this happened, he was able to choose whether or not to obey them. The fall of man, as everyone knows, was the beginning of free-will...but it is not often thought of in terms of instinct. The second human beings decided they understood how it was they lived and died, they assumed it was theirs as well to decided if they lived or died. The possibility of suicide is in direct contradiction with what the Bible preaches, and with the natural process of our bodies.

Mankind realized that he could kill himself - that he could make himself die - but that in the end, he could not make himself live. This began an unending conflict between God (instinct) and our objective knowledge of existence. I think that this is the reason for so much of the struggle between human beings. Am I making any sense???

Anyway - I'd love some feedback if anyone has any thoughts.

Astreja

If I'm following you correctly... Expulsion from the Garden as a metaphor for overriding instinctual behaviours? Not a bad analogy, that.

Once we become self-aware and see the possibility of choosing one action over another, "Eden" simply ceases to exist for us... In much the same way, we can't revert to our pre-aware infancy but must seek personal happiness in consciousness, choice and action.

davus224

yeah exactly...eden is essentially ignorance of what we need to do to survive. Because we know, we can deny. As far as I know, we're the only species that goes againts instinct because of moral decisions. It is funny, if Instinct can be said to be God, we are the most blasphemous species on the planet.

NotConvinced

Would you choose to live without choices if it meant being closer to God?

Requiem

I personally would never give up the ability to make choices just to be closer to god, even if he does exist, I'd rather be free, and by free I mean free to make my own decisions and not have some "all knowing, all powerful" entity make them for me. Or if god is embodied in natural instincts, I'd rather have the power to keep myself alive or kill myself and not be governed by the same force that governs lesser animals. And yes, in my opinion, every animal is lesser to a human.

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"He who has a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
- Sir Winston Churchill

duck

Point of clarification here, are you speaking of the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall?

Milton goes into that very deeply in Paradise Lost

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Religion: The ultimate definition of verisimilitude

AB517

Exactly.

For the first time on Earth a life form can chose. With a series of better and better compromises we gain progress; not perfection.

Drop the notion of “I was created with sin in me”. This is wrong.
There was no “fall of man”; this is an illusion of the ego. Or whatever you believe in.
God made you exactly as you are and is happy with his creation.

Now some of my choices piss him off … that is true.

Skepticologist

If there was a fall of man, which I seriously doubt, it was brought about by the propensities with which god (whom I seriously doubt, at least in a christian context) created him.

It's like a supreme being, who is referred to as god, brought inferior beings, referred to as humans, into existence with a predisposition to behave in ways he deplored. And when they behaved in ways consistent with how he created them, he banished them from the garden and, even worse, under the christian dispensation, sentenced them to an eternity of untold torment.

The christian response to such an assertion involves free will, i.e. god set you up to fail, but you can still choose to succeed against overwhelming odds, if only you summon the will, from somewhere within your god-induced depraved self, to do so.

That's exactly that train of thought that led me, after 45 years of professing to be a christian, to abandon christianity and, subsequently, to reject all the other major world religions I considered. My bottom line was that all of them contained enough inconsistencies and contradictions to merit my unconditional rejection.

My personal maxim is, if it makes sense, do it. If it doesn't make sense, do something else.

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"I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of."

Clarence Darrow

to_hobbes

This interpretation of the fall of man is one of the nicest I have ever heard. But I think the real question is what "intelligence" is and how it is different from instinct. In the thread on fate I laid out my belief on whether or not humans are just a complex computer following a pre-determined program. I think we are. But as humans part of our duty as thinking, sentient beings is to understand ourselves and learn how to determine the difference between right and wrong. That is part of our program.

I for one am glad we have fallen from heaven. It means we have the power to define our own heaven and not just lay back and accept the one that was handed to us. We have the power to define ourselves and make our world a better place.

Who was it that said (and I paraphrase) "To question and blaspheme, these are the most wonderful gifts with which God has blessed us."

Og

This is the central idea of all religion and philosophy. We did not gain choice or free will. What we gained was an illusion of categories of thought.

It's what the pyramid on the dollar bill represents (categories of thought) and what kant speaks of in his philosophy. It's what christ speaks to and represents and what the Buddha is about.

Check this post I made a long while back:
http://www.agnosticforums.com/god-ta...stinction.html

I also recommend reading "The Dragons of Eden" by Carl Sagan where he talks about many of the possible sources of the eden myth and what it means about the human brain.

This story and what it means as a metaphor is central to all religions in the world with no exceptions.

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The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
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