Was Barbara Eden from Eden? And if so, why won't she take her clothes off? A short disquisition on Adam, Eve and The Fall - Part 2: Eden Red in Tooth and Claw

This is Part 2, Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.  But you really should think about whether you really want to read this dreck. Part four is here - didn't want to but, sigh.

When last we stopped by Eden your intrepid reporter was ranting at the snake wranglers for buying into a Fall narrative that was less believable than an early Harry Potter storyline.  And I was all ready to commit premeditated apostasy or at least agnosticism in the second degree when you guys calmed me down and persuaded me to consult with the ivy covered denizens of bien pensant opinion.  But pensant or pissant I am really concerned that this fruit/fall fol-de-rol is getting too weird even for me.

So anyway, I went over and dickered with the plum suckers of Princeton Theological and here's what they had to say.*

Eden Red in Tooth and Claw

So God picks out the first two monkeys to bang the rocks together the right way and calls them Adam and Eve.  Great.  So we have two Chimps.

So I guess I need to deal with the inevitable plummy complaint that our upjumped forefathers were technically Hominids, not Chimps.  And while you're suing me why don't you rustle up some Austroplethici so that we can observe just how sweet they were to their mommas.  What?  Don't have any Hominids in the closet?  None wandering around the herbaceous borders?  The closest I've got to us today that I can observe and be horrified by is Chimps so unless you've got your very own Paleolithic Lab and Fun Park, I'm sticking with the old Daktari standby - the standard garden variety Chimpanzee.  Besides, Chimps really don't behave that much differently than my cousins in Sallisaw, I mean they'll beat up anybody that wanders over from Talequah and the girls, well, their chimp like behavior is why their brothers beat up anybody that wanders into town.

So as I said before: So we have two Chimps who are now the first humans, representatives of the Triune God to the Universe.  Chimps.  Have you ever been around Chimps? I mean really hung around them? First of all female Chimps are sluts - they screw every male in range and if the guy isn't in the mood they make him anyway.  Imagine how that will go over in Women's Ministries. But don't blame the simian ladies of the night for their promiscuity because Mr. Chimps so to speak will kill any kid that he doesn't have some probability of being dad of, hence the frenzied fucking - they're just trying to keep their kids alive.

Now calm down, Grandad

And this is the evolutionary neighborhood that God sampled from to staff his Primate Officer Corps?  Now you redheads will argue that you came from Orangutans, not baby killers but I bet you wouldn't make that claim if you knew what I knew about what they do.

So the Old Princetonians say that we're all descended from upjumped simians who ate babies that weren't theirs.  Oh joy.  But my question is how did they get the promotion?  I mean how did anyone get close enough to these utterly nasty creatures to slip them the Neshamah suppository or injection or whatever without getting either mated on or killed?  Oh well, since we're here I presume God found a way.

So exactly what happened when the suppositories took? Did Bonzo and Bonzette go from babykilling sluts to Sunday School leaders overnight?  Did they suddenly develop a sunny, unsimian outlook on life?  Were they now filled with joy and love for their brothers and sisters who were trying to kill them 24/7? Or did Bonzette still put out for the boys in the band?  And what happened to Bonzo's inconvenient appetite for baby flesh - did he really go cold turkey because cold turkey tastes nothing like warm baby chimp.  Or did he wean himself off of the unweaned slowly, with furtive detours into the occasional Chimpanzee Bar and Baby Grill for a 'nip' of the hair of the chimp that he bit?  Hmm.

I'm the McTavish and
O'Reilly's Grandad!

It seems to me that we have the mirror image of the problem that we had with the snake wrangler's Naif Duo: if they lived in an all white world then the Bonzos came from an all red one.  Red sky, red trees, bloody red baby chimps, red chimp jaws dripping red chimp blood, red, red, red.  It's almost as if our simian seekers had never experienced an unforced, non evolutionary good deed in their evolutionary lines.  They were nasty all the way down.  All sin all the time.  So how do you clean up rotters like this so that they can be candy cane nice enough to get to the point to commit the original 'sin'.  I mean the level of sin remediation required of these premier class primates just to become garden variety 'nice guys' is huge.

Or perhaps 'original sin' didn't happen the way that we think it did?  Because if we listen to the tweedier anthropologists and archaeologists they tell us that of the first truly human remains that they can find bits and pieces of 30% show evidence of violent death.  And given that in Chimpland the proportion murdered or if not murdered, then eaten by relatives after they died was probably even higher, it would seem that the best explanation was that the 'sin' slope was downward not to zero and then back up but just a gentle downward slope.  Perhaps this original sin thing is more metaphorical?

"Frat" Monkeys?

Maybe they were Blood Oranges?

Now this is not what the tweeded plummers think, this is simply my surmise borne of the surprise I felt at finding so many Chimps in the attic.  What if God's Eden is more like a very exclusive club than a place for the 'perfect'?  Or in other words, God, needing some way to separate the sheep from the goats or more to the point the enlisted Chimps from the officer Humans came up with the sorts of things that Frat boys did in a later Epoch:  secret signs and handshakes and sayings and initiations and so on?  And God in his infinite wisdom used these 'signs and wonders' to assemble his holy Eden Corps from all the Chimps he upjumped with his Neshamah juice? In this reading of scripture Adam and Eve were the first two initiates who got into the "Frat" and boy was it a great place:  awesome house, beautiful grounds, the lions weren't trying to eat you and the rest of the homicidal band that you came from is jumping up and down outside the gates guarded by these bitchin' flaming swords.  Eve (nee Bonzette) only has one (humanized) Chimp that she has to 'do' so she's pretty happy but I imagine Adam is feeling a bit of withdrawal.  I'm sure God provided some sort of substitute for Chimp baby - Chimp methadone if you will but it probably was made of tofu and didn't really satisfy. So I figure this is where the original sin came from:  during the initiation rites when the initiates were doing their 'yes sir may I have anothers' (or more accurately: ooh ooh ooh gooo, ay ay grawf, do ooher!) they probably swore that they wouldn't eat anything from the Tree of Good and Evil.  And I'll bet Good 'nEvil fruit smelled and tasted just like....fresh baby Chimp.

OK, here's part three.  Yum, yum, yum!

*Full disclosure:  I haven't dickered with anyone from Princeton Theological Seminary since my undergrad roomie went there in my long past youth and back then we usually dickered over what kind of weed he was putting in his pipe.  This entire section is a summary of what I think guys who think like those guys thinks about this think piece.  I think.  Anyway it is what it is and what it ain't is a scholarly journal article whether refereed or broken up by the police.