Friday, September 7, 2012

Knowledge and Death

Another view of an interface with death, from an aspect of orthodox fatalism, brought about much by 'the church' equating knowledge with blasphemy. When Eve partakes of fruit from the tree of knowledge, she condemns us all to a life of misery, and only when we receive divine intervention can our souls be saved.

Not original sin as much as original superstition, wasting millennia of progressive thinking.

Jost Amman — Tree of Knowledge & Death — 1587
woodcut from De conceptu et generatione hominis

2 comments:

Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...

If Richard Elliott Friedman (The Hidden Book in the Bible) and others are correct, then this part of the Bible was part of a work written as a novel, which was later incorporated into ostensibly holy scripture in a manner that allows a great deal of the original work of fiction to be recovered by extraction.

(This is not to suggest that the novel didn't itself incorporate features of still earlier stories.)

Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

Daniel, I'm fascinated by 'early literature'. One, I wonder about the original inspirations for the authors. And two, I wonder how so many people took the stories as gospel.