Charles Robert Darwin (1809)
Abraham Lincoln (1809)
Anyway, on to the real meat of the day...
Topic: The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and its Implications on the Idea of Ignorance
Disclaimer: I will be using the proper name "God," so every time "god" appears, it shall be capitalized. Also, any association to God (e.g. "He," "His," etc.) shall be capitalized.
"Ignorance is bliss" is a well regarded statement to the idea of being completely content with not knowing the truth of a certain matter. It can be used in everyday language, and it often is. It is natural idea that can attest to the times that we live in today, considering how much information is offered up for our amusement on any given situation. I know many would agree with me that I would much rather not know what the name of Obama's new White House pup.
But I digress.
We must first examine what God told Adam when he was first created in the Garden of Eden:
"The Lord God gave man this order: 'You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except for the tree of knowledge of good and bad. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.'" (Gen 2.16-17)
Right away we see that God is banning man from eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Why? Why is is that God specifically bars this tree from man's reach? Man is allowed to eat from the tree of life so that he may live, but not from the tree of knowledge so that he may have knowledge of said life? It seems that we must look further into God's demands.
To do this, we'll look into another line in Genesis 2:
"The man and his wife [the suitable partner for man] were both naked, yet they felt no shame." (Gen 2.25)
This line may seem pointless, but I say that it's clearly tying the idea of knowledge with the idea of shame. To have knowledge is to have shame for being naked? This seems the reasonable assumption, considering the previous lines.
Does this mean that God has taken it upon himself to determine the underlying guilt we would feel for denying God based on our knowledge? No. Rather, those that wrote the original texts have established this thought. They realized early on that they must push the idea of ignorance into our minds to keep said minds from traveling outside the realm of God into a world I like to call "Logic."
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But, alas, I must stop here. I feel as if my thoughts are being controlled by some higher power... I will continue my discussion on this topic in a later post.
Thanks for reading.
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