God is cruel

That rationalization is a very common, even basic human response to a conflict between dependency needs and abuse. It's easier to see and understand it if you investigate the guilt and self blame of survivors of parental abuse. It's common that the victim rationalizes the abuse that they were bad and somehow deserved it and are to blame. This reflects the deep dependency need to have "good" parents and that the mind functions to preserve emotional values.Rationality is of relative late emergence and doesn't have the power of our more primitive emotional needs. Rationalizing comes before rationality and examples of that can be found in even the most brilliant of thinkers though I confess this sleepy morning I can't think of a single example.(just thought of Newton's interest in astrology, but I don't know much about that)Fritz Perls talked about the importance of retroflection, diverting an impulse from an object to the self, in the Jewish religion. On occasions of disasters, defeats, etc. when the populace would feel rage directed at the priests and the God they represented the priests convinced the people to be angry with themselves and accept the blame. The bad thing happened because of their failures. God and the priests were righteous and the people were to blame so they retroflected their anger back onto themselves, a type of guilt function.This kind of manipulation went on after 9/11 or the flooding of New Orleans. Preachers with say an anti homosexual agenda blamed these events on homosexuality. There is no rational basis for this but rationality remains a big challenge for humans and so there are people who will literally buy into these kinds of sales pitches. That is to say they will send money. Irrationality pays whether it's selling soft drinks, fashion, or religion. And our human irrationality spans the range from the truly tragic to the ridiculous, sometimes simultaneously.lfen

I'll toss in a decidely non christian and most definitely non literalist understanding of the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.Humans did at some point develop reflexive self awareness of themselves and with this a consciousness of their actions including judgements of themselves and their actions. This self reflexive consciousness resulted in an ego which feels itself to be a separate and independent entity.With this comes feelings of aloneness, uncertainty, fears, guilt the whole "burden" of self consciousness. Feeling separate from All That Is (can be referenced as God) humans began to suffer from their separation. And as humans are wont to do this suffering felt like a punishment, and if punished they must have been guilty of something that brought about the separation. Feeling out of harmony with God's will the crime then is disobediance.Living in Eden is living in a state of oneness with All That Is, with the Universe, or God. The story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is a mythical expression of the understanding of the loss when self consciousness which includes the judgements of good and evil comes into being.The fall is a falling into individual consciousness, identification with the organism as a delimited entity, a falling into the dream of being separate and suffering from that sense of separation or sin.This is an extremely condensed capsule overview of my take on the story. On the one hand nothing went wrong. All That Is has manifested this. On the other hand it feels wrong and disjointed and consciousness caught in the dream finds the isolation to be at times a nightmare and seeks release, or return to knowing that it and the Whole are one.lfen

I've read Jaynes book and it was fascinating. The position I'm advocating is the reverse of that though. I am saying our consciousness is the illusion, the dream and that the way out is to wake up. This is a statement from a Buddhist or Advaita non dual veiewpoint.lfen

The way Shri Ramana Maharshi talked about his life is very like to what you describe as an eden state.Ramana did not identify himself with his body. He would say things like the body has to toil, get ill, die but that he only witnessed those things, that his state never changed.Ramana sometimes compared pure consciousness to a movie screen. When fire is projected on the screen it doesn't burn and when the ocean is projected on it is doesn't get wet.lfen

God is cruel among many other things. Job and the crucifixion evidence this as well as killing infants in Jericho and turning people to salt! Well, not that that happened.Yes, cruel from the ego's stand point. Though I don't believe hell is permanent yet it is horrible the hells that people experience for hours, days, years on end. Long enough.Ramana said: It's all part of the dream and it's only dream.lfen