Why The Adam And Eve Story Stirs Up So Much Controversy

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Though there's some confusion about the differences between the first two chapters of Genesis, the story told in Genesis 3 is fairly straightforward. Adam and Eve are content in the Garden of Eden, the paradise God has created for them. But then a serpent appears and tempts Eve to eat from the one tree God has explicitly told them to leave alone. Both she and Adam consume that tree's fruit and, as the King James Version of Genesis puts it, "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked." The pair cover themselves, are caught by God anyway, and are expelled from the Garden to face a mortal lifetime of suffering.

For many, the moral of this story is pretty obvious: don't disobey God. But, for others, that only skims the surface. It could be a story about humanity realizing its own mortality, though the Carl F.H. Henry Center argues that maybe this misses the theological point. Or, as the Bible Review puts forth, it could be that the story is a larger allegory about the "knowledge" of human sexuality.

Other theories go even farther off the path. According to Atlas Obscura, some argue that the Adam and Eve story may be linked to psychedelics, which could "open" one's mind to new knowledge. Or, as others counter, some of the key pieces of evidence here could just be poorly-painted trees that look like mushrooms.

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