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The Real Oldest Profession
The world’s oldest profession is giving bad advice to women. The serpent in the Garden of Eden invented it and found an easy mark in our First Mama, Eve. Being a biblical scholar and expert on myth and culture, I suspect it went something like this:
Serpent: Look at you collecting all those wonderful herbs and berries. Does Adam appreciate all you do for him?
Eve: Of course he does. He says I am the best part of all creation.
Serpent: But he is off all day naming animals, plants and even stars, obsessively getting to know things. He spent most of yesterday afternoon walking with God and watching bees. Bees! Seriously, shouldn’t he be spending that time with you?
Eve: Learning and affirming all of nature is his job, silly.
Serpent: But why not learn it all in one fell swoop. Isn’t that what the fruit of that one tree is for?
Eve: We are forbidden. It would be wrong and selfish to try to gain such power.
Serpent: But you would not be doing it for yourself but for Adam. You are the least selfish creature in the whole garden.
Eve: Oh, Stop it. You’re embarrassing me.
Serpent: You know Adam is obviously too hung up on his big-deal mission to properly think about you or what is best for both of you. Maybe you need to be the one to do it for the both of you. What could be more loving, especially if done by someone like you who never wants anything for herself and only thinks of him and of the power you both deserve? Together, of course.
Cue the angelic flaming sword SWAT team to stand by because that apple is coming down…
Why do young women accept the sheer barbarism of hook-up culture? Or the post-Roe world where a baby is just her body/her problem rather than a miraculous moral and personal connection to a father, families, and community? Our sexual mores and culture seem as if they were imposed for the convenience of Harvey Weinstein, Bills Clinton and Cosby, and lounge lizards everywhere.
And the scope of American female suckerhood is widening. Boys who “identify” as girls are winning track meets while feminists still don’t seem to get that the identity politics they promoted eventually comes for us all. Victimhood celebrations in the wake of #MeToo also mean that male CEOs will have nothing to do with, much less mentor young women for fear of accusations. The decision by women to privilege the rantings of male-hating harridans in academia and literature poisons possibilities of intimacy, commitment, and sanity.
Women also appear to be more suspectable to the political rhetoric of fear and protection. Political operatives study and scheme about whether “soccer moms” can be made more afraid of terrorism, economic collapse, crime, or catastrophic climate change but the choice to deploy a fear/protection pitch is the constant. Young single women, trained to be terrified of commitment, trained to crave ‘safe spaces’ and feeling pressured to delay reproduction indefinitely out of fear of financial stress over and above tuition load debt are being groomed for fear/protection politics for life.
We have dystopian anti-communities in the inner cities largely because the federal government aggressively and successfully sought to outbid poor working men for possession of women and children. Upscale white women now increasingly vote for the same deal: guarantees of income and health care, guarantees of job security, and assistance of all kinds in lieu of the more uncertain adventure of building a life and family with a man.
The fruit on that tree now claims to be security, safety, job satisfaction, and the promise of uninterrupted material well-being. An awful lot of women don’t seem to have learned much since that first bogus sales pitch that got us all into the current mess. Thank God, for the spectacular exceptions to that tendency and if there was ever a time for them to rise to the forefront, it’s now.
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Well, that and the fact that one seldom sees men wearing pearls.
Well, you know what I mean: Because women determine what’s socially appropriate and inappropriate, they more naturally silence dissent than men do by labeling it socially inappropriate.
The social power women have is, I think, the reason, in the story, that the serpent goes after the woman. She’s more likely to influence the man through that power than the man is to influence her.
And remember, the knowledge of good and evil was not dependent on eating the fruit and doing wrong. If Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit, they would have experienced and known the difference between good and evil by choosing good instead. [And their way to the Tree of Life would not have been barred.] The knowledge of good and evil was in the obedience or disobedience, not in the fruit.
You are incorrect, and are using a common misreading of the passage.
It is specifically the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. If knowledge was bad, the story would not have Adam going around naming stuff. (The concept is the important thing here) Adam and Eve are in charge of the garden, they can eat from any tree in the garden besides this one tree. They are told to be fruitful and multiply, so it is not some kind of puritanical existence. It’s a question of faith / trust in God – do they trust His judgement and guidance, or rebel?
The serpent pitched the following deal:
What they got was an eventual death in a dying world of brutal consequences, feeling shame and betrayal, and a new diploma from the school of hard knocks as their parting gift from paradise.
As you are an atheist, consider the moral lesson being taught independent of the god-stuff. It’s a bit like the Gods of the Copybook Headings or just general conservatism – breaking rules has painful consequences, trying to become God will lead to your downfall, and if you need to know why something is a bad idea, the answer might hurt like hell.
Start with general safety – everything goes to the side when something wants to eat you or someone wants to kill you. Society needs to provide this or allow people to provide it themselves.
Then you have ability to fulfill basic needs like food, water, and shelter. If people cannot get food, they will get desperate.
Next, you have the ability to own stuff that is your own – property. This is where law and order steps in.
After that, you have various potential hazards that need to be prepared for – the closer the hazard, the more we want to prepare.
Next, you have social belonging, which people need to some extent. This interweaves with the major threats.
Ease tends to be more toward the bottom of the list
Maybe so. My thinking is not like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s not that I exactly disagree with you, but that I organize it differently.
I would say that there are three prime carnal motivators. I do believe that pretty much everything in life, or every malevolent inclination, can be summed up in three fallen urges: the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. These do seem to overlap, but I think they can be easily differentiated; and these are succinct and there is no need for more.
People want money because it can satisfy their primary desires most easily. Money happens to be the tool that makes things easier.
In my experience, everyone wants ease; everyone would prefer to snap one’s fingers and have whatever they want, say, a sumptuous meal, to appear in front of them. This was proven in the Plymouth Bay Colony. When people were given the choice of eating either with or without working, and so many people chose to eat without working that many needlessly starved. This is why people prefer receiving $600 a week to sit on their sofas than a lesser amount to work full time.
People seem to prefer the easy way in life. Ease is the opposite of labor. Money is the easiest way to satisfy one’s desire in fulfilling these three urges. That’s why everyone wants it. And easy money is preferred. This is why so many play the lotto. Money more easily satisfies one’s Lust of the Eyes, or covetousness, or generally, acquisitiveness; nice clothes, costly jewelry, fine paintings, expensive cars, beautiful women, etc. And money helps to easily satisfy the Lusts of the Flesh, in tasty foods, sexual promiscuity, adrenaline sports, drug use, being a couch potato, and other forms of dissipation. And money can even support the Pride of Life; it can easily buy safety, independence, respect, power, control over others, promote envy, and, given enough of it, even fund one’s search for immortality.
[This can all be put down to Mankind’s existential fight against entropy, I suppose.]
you raise good points.
when I say ‘trader’, I mean domestic trade not trans Atlantic
Creator.
A profession on one. Actually, I think God professed Himself to be the I AM That I AM.
Distinction with no difference. It’s only important if you think that there is some potentially maleficent deity who might punish you.
That’s what he is, and who he is, creator is what he does.
Or a supremely beneficent deity whose grace is endless for those in communion with Him according to His law. We don’t need help on the maleficent part, we are more than sufficient in ourselves for that.
And an important distinction, Adam and Eve plainly learning, and therefore receiving all manner of knowledge about Creation and His will. But in order to sin, one needs to know what is pleasing to Him and what is displeasing to Him. It turns out disobedience is displeasing to Him. Eden is His ordered Creation, to be caretaker one must be ordered. Their disobedience revealed them to be disordered, and therefore not qualified to tend Eden. They are left to manage a world as disordered as they are and some number of their kind will find their way back to order through obedience.
While others cling to Ahab’s way: To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Some confess sin and seek forgiveness, others seize on sin to justify more sin.
Seeking knowledge is never a sin.
You said “Imagine a people who really believed and wrote a story to convince people that obtaining knowledge is bad”
I explained that the story had a completely different moral – it never says “knowledge” is bad, just one specific type. In other words, you were factually wrong. It would as wrong as stating that all atheists preach communism. You came here just to complain about religion with bogus claims, and I can prove to you via historical and textual evidence that Christianity and Judaism are not opposed to curiosity or the acquisition of knowledge.
You don’t get spread lies around about people of faith without people calling you on your BS. The distinction matters because truth matters.
Why would anyone think something so ridiculous?
God is good. All the time.
Why would one type of knowledge be held apart? When I speak of knowledge, I mean all knowledge, not the unforbidden types (forbidden by whom, for what purpose? To simply establish obedience? I’m not a dog.)
Spread lies? What lie?
But wasn’t the garden of eden basically automatic?
susceptible.
But, great post!
Interesting. The highlighted part, above, of what you wrote is an explicitly Jewish idea. May I ask if you are from within that teaching or if you discerned it on your own? If the latter, I’m even more impressed. I also agree it’s pretty spot on. Yes, overlap, but definitely simplified to those three motivators.
Of course, I agree with you. It was just a bit of gentle teasing (maybe to refute the “women have no sense of humor” suggestion?). I also agree about women’s social power. I’ve seen many more Conservative women move their men towards Conservatism that the reverse. It’s been interesting to observe how many male Conservative pundits (and politicians) have “progressive” wives. You’d think they’d be able to make a good enough argument for conservative ideas to convince the women who loved them!
In which Jewish writings? It’s a quote from I John 2:16 in the Christian scriptures as well.
Oh, I don’t know that’s the case. There are all kinds of knowledge sought by humans that most of us would consider evil. Experimenting on captive humans, as was done by both Germany and Japan during WW2 and is reportedly done by China now, may provide knowledge but it is generally held to be a vile and forbidden practice. Do you think it should be permitted in the name of increasing knowledge?
I could argue that the knowledge being sought is not actually evil, but the means being used are evil.
Is there any knowledge that can only be obtained by evil means? I doubt it. But other means may be more time-consuming, more expensive, etc, than some are willing to accept.
This reminds me of President Reagan (#21 @ 6:57)
It’s way past time to repeal the 19th Amendment.
If that happened, men – especially husbands – would never hear the end of it.
With great power comes great responsibility to endure nagging.
Experimenting is not knowledge. Experimenting is acting. Knowing that people get the bends is not the same as giving people the bends.
Ill gotten useful knowledge…
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49294861