The Good in Its Idolatrous Manifestation

The Good in Its Idolatrous Manifestation

  • Submitted By: Rowdy
  • Date Submitted: 12/12/2008 7:11 PM
  • Category: Religion
  • Words: 590
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 490

The word.. “good” played a pivotal role in the Bible’s describing how our human situation developed and with so many interpretations of what it means, has probably been responsible for most, if not all the pain that has ever come about through peoples’ disagreeing on what it really and truly is. Everyone we know about wants it. In the Genesis story, it occurs very early; it occupies along with its supposed opposite, evil, the status of a “tree”. If we allegorize this story and pick every detail in it as representing the more abstract nature of the good and evil battle, we can easily see that good and evil were not an option for people to get involved with. It seems that the Creator Himself wanted to be the main value by which human beings determined what was best. Reminds me of the old Buffering commercial years ago when the frustrated voice cries out, “Mother please, I’d rather do it myself.” The story may simply be an attempt to poetically describe how the problems of discerning the difference between that which we’ve labeled each way, as something that was “in the reality” which of course, God created; so it would appear as a presence there… and the writer calls it a “fruit tree”. as a “fruit” on a tree. And this tree of course is a tree that is very interesting, for it is the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Biblical literalists will scream at me for saying that the tree surely must have been a “metaphorical one”, for how can something as abstract as good and evil be anything else but metaphorically described if you are using a story form to clinch it in peoples’ minds? such an actual tree, and seriously doubt if anyone actually has. For in reality, there’s no such actual tree for this descriptive way of seeing the first appearance of the word “good” as being on a tree of such calling, would surely make it to mean that it was a part of the creation itself. And when we reflect upon such a tree as this, can we not help but think of...

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