Another Take on Adam and Eve

I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but I re-discovered a quote that pertains to the whole Adam and Eve business. It may come as a surprise, but the Bible isn’t the only thing I read or have read.

Whenever I read something I find interesting for some reason or another I write it down in what has become a book of quotes. What is surprising is that I found the following quote interesting before I even contemplated this Bible reading adventure. The quote below is from Ayn Rand’s epic Atlas Shrugged:

“What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they considered perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil – he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor – he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire – he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness and joy – all of the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but his essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was – that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love – he was not man.”

Rand focuses on the way religious circles describe the story of Adam and Eve as a detrimental fall of mankind. She has an ability far superior to my own, and her insight is a welcome change of tone from my own prose. I don’t want to spoil her intriguing analysis with lesser discussion on my part, so I want to just leave this quote for your own reflection.

I know there are many authors with opinions about religion and the Bible, so I’ll keep an eye out and add their ideas when they come up.