THE INSPIRED SERPENT
While heading to work this morning, a simple but profound observation sprang quite unexpectedly to mind. Human beings don't like to obey. Okay, fair enough, obvious, and seemingly mundane. The truth though, held more or less secretly by most, is that we're completely repulsed by the idea of obedience, as well we should be. It's fitting that human beings demand our choices be made for the right reasons and of our own accord. It's important that through living, through failing, we learn for ourselves what is best and choose to do it because we recognize it as such. We can only claim to be mature when virtue becomes an existential part of our character, and this maturity, this wisdom, is an inductive discipline that requires time, experience, and personal failures.
Thus, I consider The Garden legend a hoax. We are perfectly adapted to learn, recognize, and appreciate for ourselves how it's best to live. For us to simply conform blindly, without personal understanding, is to be less than human. Human beings are not supposed to ignorantly obey, to comply with maxims without the recognition of their significance. To do so would be good - inasmuch as the maxims are good - but only in a very simple way. It could be argued then that the emergence of sin as a concept and behavioral output is quite fortunate and inevitable, for it allows the possibility for a much greater, more robust and complex good. So forgive my blasphemy, but I have a sneaking suspicion: if The Fall ever did occur, I suspect God himself was the serpent.