I have to admit I haven't spent much time reflecting on The Fall. I capitalize it to differentiate it from all of the other trips, stumbles, pratfalls and belly flops that characterize the world that we live in. It seems that we're always bounding down steps or flipping over obstacles. And every stinking mother tumble of them is due to the first fall: The Big One: Adam's Fall.
About the only time that The Fall really ever pierced my consciousness was as a child when the notion of Eve waltzing around Eden in her altogether captured my imagination in that sniggering way only available to boys who have yet to be impaired by testosterone. Admittedly, I didn't know about the Song of Solomon and had I it is quite unlikely that I would have found it taught in the First Baptist Churches' Children's Sunday School program. Besides, I would have had no idea why ripe melons got the author so worked up. I mean I liked a good cantaloupe as much as the next kid. But I had yet to develop the mammary vocabulary that would reflect my steady and irreversible poisoning by Mr. T ("I pity the man who ain't hairy and don't smell"). And so lacking, I had no language to feast on the lush, lyrical poetry of Solomon. Incidentally, everyone says that S.O.S. was written as an allegory of God's love for us as well as a love poem for one of Solomon's favorite wives but I think Solomon actually hired a bronze age Barbara Cartland to gin up the rather ripeish verse as a way to get the girls going so that he could complete the Solomon 500 before hell froze over. I mean he didn't have a lot of time to whisper sweet nothings much less give each wife a slap and a tickle - he had to be on the job from the get-go so the poetry subbed for foreplay. Never has anyone been more single mindedly dedicated to the severe, ascetic art of the forward thrust. Except perhaps Mohammed and Bill Clinton - but certainly no one else.
So where was I. Oh, yeah, creation and Eve: sweet naked Eve. I have to admit that I have never had use for naked Adam, the dumb cluck just clutters up the frame. I mean, what is the point of naked men? The Greeks liked them but take it from the Romans: the Greeks were all a bit nuts - speaking of nuts can you imagine what would happen to yours if you ran a Marathon sans culottes? No wonder the Greek world almost died out.
But what I really wanted to talk about was Adam and Eve and what it must have been like for them to experience the fall. And given that by screwing up they screwed it up for the rest of us I wanted to imagine what their state of mind must have been and how they processed an experience which to that point in time had never been experienced. I want to get inside their heads, live in their skins, particularly Adam's when he was near sweet, naked Eve.
Perhaps the most trenchant and sophisticated critique of the theology of the fall was written by a famed English mystic who served in a secret sect of English monks called the "Beeb" Brother Douglas Adams wrote several volumes of his Summa Magnificat: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where he reflected on the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything" - he was an ambitious little prat, wasn't he? Adams said of Adam's Fall:
“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.'
'Why not?'
'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.”
I think we can all agree that Brother Adam's critique of The Fall is deep and profound in its import. As a matter of fact why don't we pause for a moment of silence to reflect on its profundity.
Okay, let's not get carried away, Dougie was just a smart alec who tried to be funny but the question is: was he right? Was Eden a set up job? Was the Fall just a practical joke by God that had to happen eventually? Or are we all stuck here just because Eve was a world class nagger? Does God feel sorry for us? Is he mad at us? Or are we simply a channel on heavenly cable, just before the Folgangchan people of Setraginus V and after the Lesser Dorkling of Alpha Proxima? And if you press SAP will we all start thinking in Spanish? And are we funny? I mean really funny, Emmy quality funny?
Ribs 'n Bibs or Monkey's Uncles?
There are two theories (okay there are tons, there are two that I understand enough to write about) that have been proposed for the creation of Adam and Eve: one, favored by tweedy types with plummy accents, tenure at Princeton Theological and the ability to make an awesome sacramental martini is evolution: God created creation which after a lot of dithering and screwing around produced monkeys of a caliber that they could be anointed as human beings. God called the first two to bang the rocks together the right way Adam and Eve. In this reading of scripture, the part where Eve gets made out of Adam's rib was actually put in there by Moses to get back at his wife who had been busting his chops for spending so much time screwing around on mountain tops. The Jewish describe the process of converting simple animals (apes, monkeys, baboons, whatever my brother was) into God breathed humans as the gifting of the Neshamah or human soul to complement the Nefesh or animal soul. Regardless, as the story goes (or is made up if you're on the other side), once the monkeys got their Neshamah, they became aware of God and entered into a relationship with Him. I sort of imagine this being the climax of a Busby Berkeley number "I gotta be me! With the Great Big He!" as the monkeys stop ooh ooh oohing and begin a sophisticated song and dance routine complete with dancing seraphim and cherubim.
The other explanation is what I would call Bible Classic - no not the comic books, but they're good aren't they? Bible Classic is favored by more denimy types with persimmon accents who make a mean rattlesnake venom cocktail and have full time employment at Bud's Tire Barn. This theory of Creation posits that God made Adam and Eve from scratch right after he made all the other animals so he was able to integrate the learnings he got from them (shorter necks than giraffes, less hair than Chimps and so on). In this interpretation Moses didn't make up the rib thing, instead the rib was literally the biological basis for cloning Adam without a y chromosome, hence Eve. Given that bone marrow stem cells can be reversed into a pluripotent state for the cloning of organs it is amazing how much sense that Bible Story makes biology-wise.
Regardless of which creation story or myth or yarn or tale or documented National Enquirer True Story you believe the story line around the Fall just doesn't add up. It seems like somehow Moses or whomever transcribed this part of scripture dropped some pages or perhaps they were stone tablets that broke. Because I honestly can't see how either scenario could have led to a credible "First Sin" outcome.
Candy Cane Chaos
Let me explain what I mean by going through the two scenarios in more detail and I'll start with Bible classic version this time. So Bible classic Adam and Eve showed up naked as the day they were - well that was the day they were born in a place called the Garden of Eden which to hear tell of it was a rather weird locale. It was 'perfect' if by perfect you mean perfectly weird - the lions didn't just lie down with the lambs, they were in the same handball (paw, hoof?) league and whatever kept the mosquitoes going bzzzz, it wasn't blood because Adam and Eve lived a 'perfect' (there's that word again) life. Which I guess meant no pain, no sorrow, no being picked last, no mockery, whooping cough, rashes, sprains, disappointments, betrayals, flayings, murders, irrational orders, bad oysters, diarrhea, monomania, kleptomania, hypertrophy or hypo adenoidism. It sounds like absolutely nothing ever went on - the Naif Duo wandered from friendly Dingo to kindly Tyrannosaurus accompanied by the Army Ants who hummed 'Whistle While You Work' even though nobody did in a fog of goodwill, peace on earth, joy and utter ignorance.
Ignorance of evil, that is. They had good down to a science - when cats stop and compliment you on your good looks you know that you are in a terminally good place. So good that your teeth rot from the sickening sweetness of it. It's like a bloody Mary Poppins singalong with Dick Van Dyke pretending to be some stupid penguin with his pants around his knees. For us hardened veterans of what we assume is the 'real' world, the candy cane houses and gumdrop dreams of Classic Adam and Eve are pretty hard to take. And into this sappy, saccharine sunburst of niceness God slips the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Let's think about this Good'nEvil Tree for a moment, shall we? The naifs are experts on good, they know good so good that it's great. But Evil? They haven't got a clue. They don't know what it looks like, smells like, tastes like or is like. It's like they live in a pure white world with white trees, white clouds, white sunshine, white sky, white people, white black people, white, white, white. And if you live in an all white world you don't know what black is. They were clueless about Evil. They were as clueless about evil, as able to make a reasoned judgement about the consequences of disobeying God and eating from the tree as my three year old was. No, that's not true because my three year old had experienced the pain of teething and gas, he had sinned and even gotten a few smacks from yours truly. He understood disappointment and frustration and it pissed him off. Compared to Adam and Eve, he was a battle hardened sinner of the old school - the Sergeant Rock of Sin.
But we are supposed to believe that God let these candy cane kooks, these marshmallow morons make the call for all of humankind for all time on whether we would sin or not? These clueless koo koos who didn't know their pooer from a pez dispenser were given the proxy for 60 billion souls and counting? They had signing authority for an entire fucking planet for all eternity? These yahoos, these created clowns that people who drink snake spit believe in? Excuse me?
It's like letting my three year old decide whether or not we're going to Nuke Iran. "Okay junior, is'ms gonna kill those nasty ayatollahs with the big bad thermonuclear MIRVed missile? Or do those naughty Russians need to be fried today?" Yeah right - a God who would let a toddler decide the fate of the world would be like some guy who let a poisonous serpent go talk to his children. Oops.
So Satan is a nasty serpent - I imagine he's a Komodo dragon with a potty mouth filled with bacteria and lies and he goes strolling up to Mrs. Klueless and lies through his fangs to a woman who's never heard a lie before. Ooh, this is going to end well. So she buys his line of hooey tucks into a red ripe one and bam! Reality hits her straight in the kisser. All of a sudden she realizes that her ass looks rather big in this....nothing and what's more this pervert snake is looking straight at her nothingness and - well the first thing she thinks to do is begin nagging Adam. Because nagging your husband is really the Ur-Sin - the first one, the one that leads to all the other ones. So she yells "yoo hoo, Adam" and lays into the old boy good and hard because he really doesn't want to disobey God but that lying snake Satan backs his suddenly termagant wife who for some strange reason keeps covering up her boobs and crotch and so he says "what the hey" and bam! All of a sudden...well you know the rest.
And then God has the temerity, the unmitigated gall, the holy cojones to waltz in to a situation that is as set up as a Lego town and go all Claude Rains: "shocked, shocked at the sin going on here". The guy who made Satan a four star devil and bunged him into the Garden knowing full well what he would do is trying to pin the dirty deed not only on Eve and Adam but on their kids and ultimately me? Really God? No offense but I think You've just committed the sin of first class Bullshit!
OK, calm down Bill, take a deep breath because this is just scenario number one. It probably didn't happen the way the snake wranglers say. Let's go over and talk to the tweedy plum suckers and get their version of events. After all they're educated so they're bound to know something.
Come on, go for part two, you know want it!
 |
| Whoops! |
About the only time that The Fall really ever pierced my consciousness was as a child when the notion of Eve waltzing around Eden in her altogether captured my imagination in that sniggering way only available to boys who have yet to be impaired by testosterone. Admittedly, I didn't know about the Song of Solomon and had I it is quite unlikely that I would have found it taught in the First Baptist Churches' Children's Sunday School program. Besides, I would have had no idea why ripe melons got the author so worked up. I mean I liked a good cantaloupe as much as the next kid. But I had yet to develop the mammary vocabulary that would reflect my steady and irreversible poisoning by Mr. T ("I pity the man who ain't hairy and don't smell"). And so lacking, I had no language to feast on the lush, lyrical poetry of Solomon. Incidentally, everyone says that S.O.S. was written as an allegory of God's love for us as well as a love poem for one of Solomon's favorite wives but I think Solomon actually hired a bronze age Barbara Cartland to gin up the rather ripeish verse as a way to get the girls going so that he could complete the Solomon 500 before hell froze over. I mean he didn't have a lot of time to whisper sweet nothings much less give each wife a slap and a tickle - he had to be on the job from the get-go so the poetry subbed for foreplay. Never has anyone been more single mindedly dedicated to the severe, ascetic art of the forward thrust. Except perhaps Mohammed and Bill Clinton - but certainly no one else.
So where was I. Oh, yeah, creation and Eve: sweet naked Eve. I have to admit that I have never had use for naked Adam, the dumb cluck just clutters up the frame. I mean, what is the point of naked men? The Greeks liked them but take it from the Romans: the Greeks were all a bit nuts - speaking of nuts can you imagine what would happen to yours if you ran a Marathon sans culottes? No wonder the Greek world almost died out.
But what I really wanted to talk about was Adam and Eve and what it must have been like for them to experience the fall. And given that by screwing up they screwed it up for the rest of us I wanted to imagine what their state of mind must have been and how they processed an experience which to that point in time had never been experienced. I want to get inside their heads, live in their skins, particularly Adam's when he was near sweet, naked Eve.
Perhaps the most trenchant and sophisticated critique of the theology of the fall was written by a famed English mystic who served in a secret sect of English monks called the "Beeb" Brother Douglas Adams wrote several volumes of his Summa Magnificat: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where he reflected on the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything" - he was an ambitious little prat, wasn't he? Adams said of Adam's Fall:
“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.'
'Why not?'
'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.”
I think we can all agree that Brother Adam's critique of The Fall is deep and profound in its import. As a matter of fact why don't we pause for a moment of silence to reflect on its profundity.
Okay, let's not get carried away, Dougie was just a smart alec who tried to be funny but the question is: was he right? Was Eden a set up job? Was the Fall just a practical joke by God that had to happen eventually? Or are we all stuck here just because Eve was a world class nagger? Does God feel sorry for us? Is he mad at us? Or are we simply a channel on heavenly cable, just before the Folgangchan people of Setraginus V and after the Lesser Dorkling of Alpha Proxima? And if you press SAP will we all start thinking in Spanish? And are we funny? I mean really funny, Emmy quality funny?
Ribs 'n Bibs or Monkey's Uncles?
 |
| From flinging poo.... |
 |
| ..to doot doot doo doot doo. |
 |
| Oooh look: cocktails. |
The other explanation is what I would call Bible Classic - no not the comic books, but they're good aren't they? Bible Classic is favored by more denimy types with persimmon accents who make a mean rattlesnake venom cocktail and have full time employment at Bud's Tire Barn. This theory of Creation posits that God made Adam and Eve from scratch right after he made all the other animals so he was able to integrate the learnings he got from them (shorter necks than giraffes, less hair than Chimps and so on). In this interpretation Moses didn't make up the rib thing, instead the rib was literally the biological basis for cloning Adam without a y chromosome, hence Eve. Given that bone marrow stem cells can be reversed into a pluripotent state for the cloning of organs it is amazing how much sense that Bible Story makes biology-wise.
Candy Cane Chaos
Let me explain what I mean by going through the two scenarios in more detail and I'll start with Bible classic version this time. So Bible classic Adam and Eve showed up naked as the day they were - well that was the day they were born in a place called the Garden of Eden which to hear tell of it was a rather weird locale. It was 'perfect' if by perfect you mean perfectly weird - the lions didn't just lie down with the lambs, they were in the same handball (paw, hoof?) league and whatever kept the mosquitoes going bzzzz, it wasn't blood because Adam and Eve lived a 'perfect' (there's that word again) life. Which I guess meant no pain, no sorrow, no being picked last, no mockery, whooping cough, rashes, sprains, disappointments, betrayals, flayings, murders, irrational orders, bad oysters, diarrhea, monomania, kleptomania, hypertrophy or hypo adenoidism. It sounds like absolutely nothing ever went on - the Naif Duo wandered from friendly Dingo to kindly Tyrannosaurus accompanied by the Army Ants who hummed 'Whistle While You Work' even though nobody did in a fog of goodwill, peace on earth, joy and utter ignorance.
Ignorance of evil, that is. They had good down to a science - when cats stop and compliment you on your good looks you know that you are in a terminally good place. So good that your teeth rot from the sickening sweetness of it. It's like a bloody Mary Poppins singalong with Dick Van Dyke pretending to be some stupid penguin with his pants around his knees. For us hardened veterans of what we assume is the 'real' world, the candy cane houses and gumdrop dreams of Classic Adam and Eve are pretty hard to take. And into this sappy, saccharine sunburst of niceness God slips the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Let's think about this Good'nEvil Tree for a moment, shall we? The naifs are experts on good, they know good so good that it's great. But Evil? They haven't got a clue. They don't know what it looks like, smells like, tastes like or is like. It's like they live in a pure white world with white trees, white clouds, white sunshine, white sky, white people, white black people, white, white, white. And if you live in an all white world you don't know what black is. They were clueless about Evil. They were as clueless about evil, as able to make a reasoned judgement about the consequences of disobeying God and eating from the tree as my three year old was. No, that's not true because my three year old had experienced the pain of teething and gas, he had sinned and even gotten a few smacks from yours truly. He understood disappointment and frustration and it pissed him off. Compared to Adam and Eve, he was a battle hardened sinner of the old school - the Sergeant Rock of Sin.
But we are supposed to believe that God let these candy cane kooks, these marshmallow morons make the call for all of humankind for all time on whether we would sin or not? These clueless koo koos who didn't know their pooer from a pez dispenser were given the proxy for 60 billion souls and counting? They had signing authority for an entire fucking planet for all eternity? These yahoos, these created clowns that people who drink snake spit believe in? Excuse me?
It's like letting my three year old decide whether or not we're going to Nuke Iran. "Okay junior, is'ms gonna kill those nasty ayatollahs with the big bad thermonuclear MIRVed missile? Or do those naughty Russians need to be fried today?" Yeah right - a God who would let a toddler decide the fate of the world would be like some guy who let a poisonous serpent go talk to his children. Oops.
 |
| Yumm-eeeee |
And then God has the temerity, the unmitigated gall, the holy cojones to waltz in to a situation that is as set up as a Lego town and go all Claude Rains: "shocked, shocked at the sin going on here". The guy who made Satan a four star devil and bunged him into the Garden knowing full well what he would do is trying to pin the dirty deed not only on Eve and Adam but on their kids and ultimately me? Really God? No offense but I think You've just committed the sin of first class Bullshit!
OK, calm down Bill, take a deep breath because this is just scenario number one. It probably didn't happen the way the snake wranglers say. Let's go over and talk to the tweedy plum suckers and get their version of events. After all they're educated so they're bound to know something.
Come on, go for part two, you know want it!
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