The1exile wrote:
Nah, that was God.
“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting ‘Gotcha’. It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.”
Hmmm. Makes the entirely invalid assumption that the only reason for the tree was to bait the hapless humans into misbehaving. I have kids, when I tell them to leave a knife alone, I'm not doing it hoping that they'll ignore me and cut themselves. I certainly didn't buy the knife and put it in the drawer with, injury to my son, as my goal.
You, I assume, know that some toadstools are poisonous, not because you've actually eaten one, but because somebody told you. Do you really believe that the toadstool exists merely to poison you? No, probably not, it's an organism that is living it's own life.
Put a tree in a garden in a Biblical story though, and look out its that wily God slapping the humans down again. Convieniently ignoring the paradise that God gave them in the first place, and that in giving them this he had the full authority as their father to place limits on them.
