If I remember right, it had something to do with the Latin words for "evil" and "apple" being similar. I didn't Google that or ask Jello first, so take that as you will.
I don't believe that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is one that we know of today. I believe that it existed solely in the Garden of Eden, which we can no longer access. Granted, the Bible doesn't explain it either way, so this is simply my personal opinion on the matter.
Which would explain why there are several passages in the Bible where God hates figs. The Westboro Baptist Church needs to update their slogan, methinks.
Figs are used because they resemble ballsacks. Simple as that. Hence also Shakespeare's punning on the subject in "Antony and Cleopatra" -- where Charmian says to the soothsayer "I love long life even more than I love figs."
What is it with Christians and sex? (Rhetorical question, I've been drinking, please no wall-of-text answers.)
well shakers dont have sex at all so at least they're consistant (that's why there's only four three of them left at the present time) an interesting side-note: they're actually arguably the most egalitarian of all christian sects in terms of gender relations and their founder was a woman who is considered to be a female manifestation of the godhead - a female incarnation to match jesus, the male incarnation EDIT: apparently i overestimated the number of remaining shakers lol. i thought there were four left but that was old info. there's actually three: two elderly woman and a man in his late fifties. the youngest was a dude in his fourties but he left a while back after falling in love with a reporter who was covering the shakers womp-womp
Well, you're not wrong, exactly. It's actually written in the Bible that one time when Jesus hadn't eaten in ages and He came across a fig tree that had no fruit, He cursed it, and the tree later died.
Why? Because that would make it sound like a cool fantasy novel? Is god going to be giving up omniscience in order to give us free will next?
No, because the Bible doesn't say either way, so I can only speculate. God gave us free will from the moment He created us. Free will and omniscience are not mutually exclusive, being aware of the choice another is going to make, and FORCING that one to make that choice, are not the same thing.
Actually, Vivec, I would tend to agree with Revanchist. The tree was described as a single specific tree, never a whole species. We have absolutely no indication that more than one of them ever existed or will exist. Further, eating the fruit somehow permanently altered the way that Adam and Eve processed the world. There is no fruit that does anything remotely like that. So that would lead one to believe it was in fact a fruit tree of some type no one has ever heard of before. EDIT: I agree about the likely species of the tree. It's just pretty lazy and arbitrary to think it had to be a sub-species of a tree that we already know of. I'm not commenting on the free will thing because most of those debates are ridiculous and not worthwhile.
I have never gotten into a religion thread ....but if you watch the history channel it will make you want to post arguments ...so my advice is not to watch the history channel and believe in what you want to believe in. Faith seems to change with the times and being a good person is hard to do.
Well, no fruit does that, and doesn't do so permanently, but on a tangent I might mention Ayahuasca, often used in religious contexts. In that connection, I raised an eyebrow at the citation of a 2008 study which suggests that a brew analogous to the drug may have been heavily connected to earliest Judaism, and goes on to propose that the Burning Bush experience was attributable to Moses being under the influence of, shall we say, the finest weed in the South Farthing.
Well, I'd actually say that's pretty wildly different than what we have described. What you mentioned in a hallucinogen. What happened to Adam and Eve doesn't seem to have disrupted their sensory input. Instead it. . .well, I'm not even sure how to characterize realizing you were naked. They could obviously see, so it must have been nakedness as a concept? They had some sort of mental or moral development, I guess.
