k so in my last blog(not the reverend one, the one before) i mentioned that there were more thoughts rattling around upstairs...i'm going to attempt now to spew them out of my head onto this computer screen...i predict this will take me several hours cause it always takes me a long time to be able to take what's in my mind and actually present it so it makes sense, but i'm gonna do it anyways.
ok so here's the rub...and this first part may be where i go wrong and the rest of this may be a partial waste of time but whatever...as i have always kind of understood things and how it seems to me when i read the passage, in genesis one generally understands that man was created without knowledge of good and evil. we understand this because God plants the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of eden and commands adam and eve not to eat of it, and it seems that it is not until they do actually eat of it that adam and eve's eyes are opened to "good and evil". now god creates man with free will, that is, the ability and freedom to make our own choices. and god gives man one command. actually let me change that. God gives man many commands(such as name the animals, be fruitful and multiply, etc.) but god gives man one command that differs from the rest, that being not to eat of the two trees, the tree of life and the tree of good and evil.
k...so the commands that god gives to man are for the most part hardly even seen as commands..."they're really more guidelines". God is just kind of explaining to mankind his role in god's created world or something like that. there is no reason for man at this point to have any reason to question god. it'd be like this guy made me, he's pretty righteous and i like him...i have no idea what i'm doing here, so this guy says do this, sure i'll do it why the heck not? but then there's this one other command that god gives which is different...rather than god saying "DO this" he suddenly says "DO NOT do this". here flags go up in my mind. man is suddenly faced with the possibility of a choice.
k hopefully i haven't lost you yet cause i'm really not sure how this is coming accross. not always the most eloquent in expressing my theological and/or philosophical thoughts.

now if you skip ahead a bit, you see that in the end man does make the choice to eat of the tree of good and evil, breaking God's command(incidently just a little rabbit trail...i wonder how things would have been different if man had eaten from the tree of life instead of the tree of good and evil?). Now it is at this point that God punishes man for breaking his command. so then i am led to believe that God considers this action by man to be a sin; for it to have been a 'wrong' choice. this doesn't add up to me though, becuase until man actually eats of the tree of good and evil, man had no real knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong...so how could god punish man for doing something wrong when man doesn't really even understand 'wrong'? this doesn't seem like it would be a just thing of God to do and i've always been taught that God is a just God.
this presents another problem to me. if man really had no knowledge of good and evil, what kind of free will could he really have? what is the point of having the freedom to make a choice when you have no idea what the consequences will be? and we're not talking like there's consequences you just miss or forget or something like that...we're talking like there's consequences that you simply are not able to understand...it's just not possible. it's like god created man with the freedom to make his own choices, and then took that freedom away by not giving him the knowledge of what making a choice is really about. when eve ate of the apple, i don't know that it's so straightforward as her making a choice. the snake in the garden told er to eat. he told her that she would not die as God had told her, but that she would be enlightened. now at this point eve did not understand good and evil, so it could be argued that all she was doing was listening to what she was told, same as she and adam had been doing when god told them to do something. so was it really much of a choice? and was it really 'wrong'? and even if adam and eve had such knowledge and knew what they were doing, if god didn't want adam and eve to eat of those trees, then why would he put them into a position where that would be a temptation for them. again this seems like setting them up to fail and it just seems off somehow...

also another side note...anyone who believes that death entered this world when god cursed man following the original sin simply can't be correct...death must have existed previous to this. this is proven by the very existence of the tree of life in the garden. God states "he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." it is pretty clear from this that mankind was not at all imortal but would die. unless he ate from the tree of life in which case he would indeed live forever. there is also the possibility that maybe death was introduced in a different manner after the original sin or maybe it's interpreted in some other way that i'm missing, that's very possible. either way this isn't as big an issue in my world...i don't even know if people really believe that mankind was imortal previous to the original sin, but it seems an idea that i've heard before, i dunno. i just thought of it very briefly while i was thinking about all this other stuff so i figured why not throw that out there too while i'm at it?

anyhoo, i've done as well as i can for right now trying to explain my thinking process here. this isn't about doubt, this isn't about questioning the legitimacy of the bible or even god or anything like that. like i said in my previous blog this is only about exploration, about seeking to know my god, to understand him as much as i can that i can grow in my relationship with him. i haven't gotten so far as to make much sense of what it all means, what it may say about God yet, but this is part of that process. and i'd love to hear any feedback that can help me to either make sense of it or to point out my foibles and errors in understanding/interpretation, etc. cause that can only help not hinder. so ya, i'm out. peace.

reverendum

i propose a vote that reverend chris seperate from the townships of viking and tofield and move to calgary alberta immediately.

all in favour: AY! all opposedMotion carries!

the reverendum has passed with a unanumous vote! looks like chris had better move here and join us!!

flawed design?

i went to bed at 2 in the morning and so far i'm batting a solid 0 for 180 in the minutes that i have been trying to sleep, i'm actually more awake now than when i went to bed 3 hours ago, and i have to leave in 3 hours to pick someone up from the airport, so i've decided to just skip the whole sleep thing for tonight. so here i am. while i was exhausting myself to relax and go to sleep, i was thinking about some stuff. i'ma try to lay it out a little bit. (pause for laughter at the show scrubs here....k let's move on

was man set up to fail from the get go? being given free will, i'm not sure that man could have not sinned. it seems that all eve needed was a little temptation from the snake and it was over. i can't help but think that god surely must have known that humans would fail to keep his command forever, he created us after all...who could know us any better than him. but if this is so, then why would god put man in a situation where he likely knew he would fail? it's like God said "i'm gonna make this guy who i know will sin, but i'll try to help him avoid it as long as possible...i'll put him in this righteous garden full of everything good, i won't fill him in on good and evil so he won't really know what's what, and i'll give him one simple command to obey, let's see how long this takes..." so much is made of how mankind is "fallen" since the original sin of adam and eve, but did we really stand a chance? i submit that we may not have! or we may have...i'm not really sure to be honest.

the point of all this is just to look at things from a bit of a different perspective... what kind of personal relationship is it if you're not trying to know and understand the other person just a little more all the time, and that's what i want my relationship with god to look like. this is something i had never really thought about before, but as i lay sleepless in bed tonight it oocured to me that though we are created in god's image, does that mean we are created perfectly? or are we created perfectly as in god created man exactly the way he wanted him "flaws" and all? but why would god create man to be in relationship with him, knowing that man would screw it up, and quickly. i haven't made much of it for myself yet and this is just a little prologue that has stirred up more thoughts that have yet to fully sort themselves out and i think are much harder to understand in my own mind so far, but don't even worry about it, i'll get there.


now for those of you who have been waiting endlessly and for some really hard to understand reason for me to blog again...i hope you're happy. and i think you can expect a couple more to follow in the very near future(as in maybe later today) while i'm trying to work this stuff out, but then it'll probably be another year or so before i blog again, so i wouldn't get too excited about it.