Genesis 3:15

As I’m making my way through John S. Spong’s book Why Christianity Must Change Or Die (of which I’ll give my opinions on later), I came across the mention of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. I’m not sure why it suddenly occurred to me, but for some reason the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’ kinda stood out - and so I had this thought.

I’ve always had a problem with good vs. evil. They’ve never made sense to me - as one person’s ‘good’ can easily be viewed as another person’s ‘evil’ - and visa versa. I’ve always held the contention that there is no ‘good’ and there is no ‘evil’ …rather, there are tendencies to drift and to resemble either one, and this degree of drifting/resemblance is characterized by what society values at that time. Society, I believe, naturally promotes itself (develops, procures, extends etc.) and eventually ‘good’ and ‘evil’ become defined …and consequently changed, then redefined, then changed, then redefined and so on. Although they may appear blatantly obvious, they are still subject to ‘drift’. For example, killing babies with hammers is generally evil, but you could make an exception to this statement by saying “these babies need to be killed because they carry a contagious disease that can destroy the earth and hammers are the only objects around to do the job”. You might say that helping an old lady to cross the street is generally good, but you could also make an exception to this by saying “the old lady has a sub-compact nuclear bomb strapped to her waist and will detonate it when she reaches the other side killing millions”. Good and evil are subjective concepts, not hard and fast ‘inflexible’ descriptors.

And this brings me to the Genesis story about ‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’. In the story God decrees that Adam NOT eat the fruit of this tree, but he does (thanks to Eve …thanks to a serpent) - and so God states “…I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed…” (Gen. 3-15 KJV) Essentially, because Man ate from the tree of knowledge of good an evil, he (along with Eve and all their offspring) have been made to live the rest of their lives with some form of conflict. My point then, is if you can discard the concept of good and evil, then you can discard the notion of conflict! You become like Adam was before he ate from the tree …problem free.

Of course this isn’t anything to be taken literally. Of course you’re not going to be transported to a new world because you no longer recognize the differences between good and evil. What I am suggesting is that by not playing into the absolutes of the terms, you may possibly see your enemies in a more positive light. You might see that there are underlying reasons for people to act the way they do, and hopefully you’ll develop an appreciation of them …realizing that people do things “not because they’re bad people”, but because of the circumstances in their life - and their life isn’t any less meaningful than yours.

Not eating from the tree would have been the best thing to do …but maybe we can reverse things a little by not buying so directly into the concept of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Maybe.