[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by alatar

How can the sin of pride exist before the first sin? That's something I'd have a tough time wrapping my head around. How could Adam disobey when he did not know good from evil?

Here I must disagree slightly with Formendacil. Pride was the first sin. Taking and eating of the fruit of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil, was the second sin of disobedience resulting from the first. There is an innocent pride and there is a sinful pride. The innocent is that which Formendacil describes. The sinful pride is that by which humans place themselves in the place of God.

Originally Posted by alatar

And here are 2X three words that to me absolve Adam and Eve, as they were created "in our image, in our likeness" (that would be God speaking). Like Aulë, weren't Adam and Eve just trying to be like their Father, not mocking him or pridefully hoping to gainsay him, but simply hoping to just be like him.

But in doing so they were choosing to accept the word of the serpent rather than the word of the One with whom they had already shared so much with, and from whom they had received so much.

Like the Dwarves who cringed when Aulë made to smash them, is it necessary for life to go outside the bounds set by its creator, to do something new?

No. It is in fact necessary to choose to be within the will of God in order to grow into the next wisdom He has waiting for us. "But isn't the will of God too narrow?" No, it is not. It is to set aside my own agenda and accept His, because His is based on a better and more loving knowledge of me than I have of myself. Talk about a wise investment!

On the other hand, having children does make one tend to believe in original sin...

Originally Posted by davem

...would they (we) have gotten that wisdom through experience or just through word of mouth?

They would have experienced direct communion with God, through which they would have received grace and wisdom, and more knowledge of good and evil than they already had.

Originally Posted by davem

This is the 'humans as lab rats' theory of religion I suppose.

No. It is humans as children of God who must learn to walk in His will before they can learn to run in it.

What kind of parent decides to run 'tests' on his children anyway - & then punish them for failing?

It was the same kind of 'test' parents 'run' on their children when they release them to try to walk ... forward. To follow the analogy, God set up the test such that Adam (both he and she - - - she was not named Eve until after the Fall) could walk forward, that is, into His will; but they chose to walk backward, that is, against His will, and thus Fell. (If this analogy suffers in some way, any analogy is limited; this one serves this purpose.)

And if Jesus succeeded where Adam failed I'd say Jesus had the advantage over Adam seeing that Jesus was the one who made everything in the first place (including Adam).

Jesus wasn't in competition with Adam. He was in a rescue operation, and had every intention of succeeding because his motivation was love, not "beating" Adam at God's little game.

I still say that if you leave innocent kids alone in a room with a box of matches which you've gone to a lot of trouble to point out to them & leave easily accessible while knowing that weird cousin Cletus (the one with pyromaniac tendencies) is visiting for the weekend & could wander in on the little cherubs at any time, then not only are you asking to come home & find the whole place a big pile of ashes & dust (My Precious) but you will have to accept most of the moral responsibility for the incident - you being the responsible adult after all.

A fascinating analogy, but flawed from the get-go. The forbidding of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil was not akin to leaving a box of matches in plain sight for children to find. Children faced with a box of matches, and a parent's directive to leave them alone while the parents are gone, have already inherited sin from their parents. Adam (both he and she) had not. They had not sinned, and had just as much likelihood of staying away from the tree as eating of it. In my experience of passing the tests of growth in Christ, I have found the tests I've been faced with to be quite difficult (being myself a sinner), but once achieved, I've not had to look back and face the same test again; it has been time to move on and up.

If you were then to go ahead & punish the children by throwing them onto the streets to fend for themselves, well......

Quite. But that is not what God did in regard to Adam.

Originally Posted by alatar

Why nudity was shameful after the Fall is a bit disturbing as these two beings were made in the image of God, and there were no others by which they could be embarassed.

This is a cause of confusion. They knew that they were naked. This expresses negative self-consciousness. "Nakedness" refers to the symptom of the deep rooted state of Adam and Eve having cut themselves off from communion with God, realizing that their disobedience had caused their shame. They had stained the image of God in themselves, and they had unleashed in themselves the seed of every evil known to humanity. Sexual desire had been corrupted into lust, which is wanting to take without giving the requisite commitment that such taking entails in God's order. Et cetera.

Originally Posted by davem

The Christian approach was to denigrate the Pre-Christian traditions they encountered by presenting them in as negative a form as possible - the form the devil usually takes in Christian iconography: horns, cloven hooves, etc is actually the form of the Pagan Horned God Pan/Cernunos - so the likely explanation for the 'forbidden fruit' being depicted as an apple is probably down to this.

It's a shame that the Church was reduced to this, which showed the spiritual powerlessness to which it had allowed itself to be reduced. The turning point for this was the advent of Constantine, who took over the church and killed the counsels, which had successfully served the Church for a good 300 years. Had it stayed uncompromised, it would have held onto those means by which it had flourished for the first three hundred years, namely the power of the Word of Christ and the power of the Spirit. So I think there has been in the last century a healthy reconnection to things that never should have been lost.

The strategy from the quote of Pope Gregory is known as "accomodation", and is in my belief inadequate. It's all outward and does not deal with the heart, where the Spirit of God does the real work. Had that been the key to Gregory's strategy, who knows how things might have gone better over the last 1500 years?

And for myself, getting back to the original question, I am most interested in (1) Tolkien's use of Elves in reference to the Atlantis legend, and (2) the many legends of sea-faring peoples who came from advanced cultures to northern Europe and delivered their wisdom and culture to the indigenous. There are the Milesians who came to Ireland, which may be the inspiration for that old Historia Britonum (please correct me someone, I know I just murdered it) which has the Trojans establishing Britain. In like manner, Tolkien has the Numenoreans come from the sinking Isle to establish their culture in Gondor and Arnor. What grabs my attention is the disconnected legends of the Irish and the known history we have of Asia Minor, giving us on one hand the folkloric "Milesians" and on the other, the citizens of Miletus, just a hundred or so miles south of Troy, which surely was just as affected by the fortunes both good and ill that befell Troy, and sent whole citizenries to their ships to find harbor in far-off ports anywhere from Carthage to Asturia to Brittany to Ireland to the Shetlands. And then there is the legend of the Fomori from the north ... there's that thing of the north again ... which puts me yet again in mind of Tolkien's choice of Morgoth in northern Thangorodrim. But now I'm wandering all over the folkloric map.....