Tree of Knowledge

As with much of the Bible, this is one great story.

Here you've got Adam and Eve, wandering around naked, happy as pigs in mud. Then there's this tree that they're not supposed to mess with. And what is it called? The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Could it be any more simple? You're a stupid animal. You feel no guilt. You eat, multiply and die. No one cares. No remorse; just being. (See Zen.)

But you notice this tree that you hadn't seen before. There's pretty things there that looks good to eat. And in one fell swoop (as in the scene from 2001 when the monkey throws the bone into the air in a mixed emotion of superiority and terror) you have become what we call

Man.

If you're not going to give people free will, why create them in the first place? It only makes sense if you're psychotic.

See also: missing the point

I'm in no position to speak for God, but I know I'd be pretty PO'd if my own progeny were still living at home and not doing anything useful with their lives after 6000 years. I think I may be alone in this belief.

Amtgard, is said to have been derived from the Norse Myth of the Isengard, also sometimes called Ausgard, Ausgart, etc. Isengard is, the guarding level between the dark elves and the high elves and the high elves are the followers of the tree of knowledge or as it is some times called the tree of life.

The popular interpretation of this story is that Adam and Eve gained the knowledge of good and evil when they ate from the tree. However, there are other rather interesting interpretations.

For example, in terms of the story God is the one who defines what is good and what is bad. Genesis mentions only one rule that God set down: not eating from that particular tree. Therefore, only one thing was defined as bad: eating from the tree.

Therefore, by this interpretation, it was not necessary to eat from the tree to gain the knowledge of good and evil; the tree's very existence provided that.

Thus we have an interpretation which doesn't actually contradict anything in Genesis, but also removes all of the mysticism from that particular section of the story; no magical gaining knowledge from a piece of fruit or anything like that.

At any rate, the first real detail we get about creation is that God saw light and said it was good. That doesn't mean that he also decided that darkness is bad, mind you, only that one of God's essential labors during creation was the identification and sequestration of things displaying distinct characteristics. Arbitrary distinctions and nomenclature seem to be beneath God's talents, as those tasks, at least as they were applied to animals and women, are delegated to Adam. Could it be that Adam was intended as a mere tool of the creation process, a bit of automata?

Reading Genesis, I can't help but get the feeling that God had a few more balls in the air than just creating the earth and the heavens. He gets pretty annoyed when Adam & Eve gain knowledge, and to me, annoyance implies some degree of inconvenience, perhaps of the oh-shit-what-did-I-just-do variety. If this was a catastrophic error on Adam's part (as the church likes to remind us), how much more of a screw-up was it for The Man, and, more importantly, to whom was he accountable?

The idea that someone might find out about that unfortunate fruit incident and be pissed is borne out when God says, "...man has become as one of us..." Us? US? Unless God had a divine turd in His pocket, to whom was he referring, and why would he care? Is all of God's conduct throughout The Bible an effort to cover up his mistake? Could His conspicuous absence in the modern world be a result of his doing time in some Penitentiary of the Gods? Wouldn't it be worth our time to plan some sort of prison break? Maybe that's what he was hoping for when he left a couple of trees that were capable of bestowing divine gifts upon his Homunculi. I think it's clear, based on my interpretation, that what God wants from us is a gigantic cake (chocolate, I think) with a big file in it, or perhaps, if we could lay hands of some fruit from the Tree of Life, a large-scale rescue mission/break-out attempt. The guy's taking heat for something we did, right? Seems like the least we could do.