Sin in the System Originally not Original Sin

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I wish you wellness this day.

It is so 90s to say that a particular item of clothing or a particular expression is "so 50s," "so 60s," or "so 70s."  The 80s were too close to the 90s to distinguish itself as a peculiar decade at that time.

When we read the Adam and Eve story, we feel compelled to say it is "so Mesopotamian" as it explains to us why work is so hard, childbirth is so painful, and snakes crawl on the ground.  

Ancient people could not fathom the concept of anything occurring naturally, so they had to blame people for the bad stuff that happens in life.  

Who knew that huge mountain that folks lived near, where a god shakes it, or a dragon rumbles it, where the view of the sea or the nearness of the sky fills the heart with an overwhelming love of beauty and grandeur--I mean--who knew that it would be lethal and a fiery sauce come hot from Hell would pour out and kill everyone in the town?

Or that other mountain that blew everyone to atoms.  Who knew?

Surely, some terrible sinner offended a god, and everyone else who died got swept up in that god's wrath.  

In a way, yes, someone or anyone who moved beside any volcano and started a village shared a causal connection with the death of everyone else burned up by lava later.

The same can be said of floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, sinkholes, and diseases.  We are at the mercy of our planet, and we cause the deaths of our future generations if we live where nature can come crashing down like a...well, you know…just fill in the blank.

In ancient times, disasters must have been inexplicable.  Everyone alive in a town would be going about their business, feeding their goats, shearing their sheep, plowing their fields, storing their grain, and just having a good old time with maybe a few hundred other people since early cities were not too heavily populated. 

Along comes a storm that wipes almost everyone out with lightening, cloud bursts, and surging waters.  Can we not all see how those who escaped may begin to wonder "why did this happen" once they reached safety and began to rebuild their lives?

And those whom the survivors fled to would wonder why such a terrible thing happened too.  What wicked deed was done to incur such divine retribution?

Stories would be told, maybe for centuries, until they were written down.  Such disasters would be attributed to gods, that is, divine personalities made in the image of the men and women telling the stories. 

Supernatural explanations are what ancient people knew before science.  And gods, like people, punish and wreck vengeance.

It would never occur to anyone in ancient Sumer, Babylon, Jericho, or Egypt that the hydrologic cycle, the clash of low pressure with high pressure systems, rapidly moving electrons, a rotating earth, and unimpeded water flow would all join together to seemingly hurl fire from the sky, blow winds from the four corners of the earth, and raise floods from fountains of the deep.  

I wrote in an earlier post about how magical rainbows must have seemed to ancient people.  Storms too would have been experienced as something sent from heaven. 

Ancient Mesopotamian people thought up the idea that natural disasters were punishments for sin.  There are at least 700 Americans in a TV club today who believe that nonsense.  

Why is there evil in the world?  Why must toil include thorns?  Why are epidurals necessary for so many women?  Why don't snakes walk on a score of legs or four?

Let me tell you why.  Once upon a time, a man and a woman disobeyed a god.  The sin that resulted from that one act of disobedience coursed throughout the world and caused all the bad in the universe today.

Now, that would make a lot of sense back then.  

It does not make sense today however, when some would have us believe that an ancient story explains why cholera strikes Haiti in 2013 or a star billions of miles away explodes.

Blessings...