[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:05] You're listening to casual talk radio, where common sense is still the norm, whether you're a new or longtime listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit [email protected] and now here's your host, Leister. [00:00:21] Something tells me I'm going to regret today's episode. And I don't regret a lot of things, but I have this distinct impression I'm going to regret today's episode. Hopefully not. I'm perhaps naive in my optimism that people are open minded because the topic in question, I think is going to rankle a few people. But I do it because of something that happened. I was sleeping and then I woke up and had. I tend to have random off the rocker thoughts when I wake up in the morning, which has changed my state of enlightenment. I have a different perspective about life because of this happening, because it happens frequently. It started when I was a kid. [00:01:04] I'm gonna guess I was probably 7, maybe 6 years old, and I was walking to school. [00:01:12] And I know I was walking to school because of what I saw. And I'm not crazy. You might think I am. And there's many people that would swear I am. I'm not crazy. As I was walking to school, it was a, I don't want to say foggy day, but it was a little bit fog, a little bit. [00:01:29] And I looked up at where the sky should be. In front, there was a water tower. And anybody that knows the area that might happen be listening to this, that knows this particular area. Walking to the elementary school, there's a green water tower and there's a road or used to road, branched two ways right where the water tower should be. I looked up over there, it's foggy and, and I saw a glowing tree. And I recognized the tree from the tree that was in the front yard of the place we moved from. It was the exact same tree. I never forgot that I saw that. And from that moment again, there's these random things that I'll see when I wake up in the morning. They run the gamut. One of them, I woke up and thought, huh, maybe that's what it's about. Because I was thinking about different people that have passed on and the randomness of it. [00:02:26] So then I figured, okay, well, because I've not experienced it, I can't really tell the story. But what I can do is kind of rethink things that I've just accepted as stories. [00:02:38] Anybody that follows the Bible, so Christianity, the Bible already is familiar with the story of Adam and Eve I think everybody is familiar with the story. You probably have memorized the basic idea of it. The basic idea is that God created man and woman. Woman came from man's rib and they're naked essentially in the Garden of Eden. [00:03:03] One day, a snake tempts Eve. Eve takes the forbidden fruit that God has told them not to touch of this one tree, and bites of the fruit they get banished, both Adam and Eve. And then they go out and create all of the modern people. Now, at the time, you know, I first heard it, I was really young and didn't think about it. Then later I got to thinking, well, that's a very interesting story. [00:03:31] And people always asked about the fruit and all this, but I took a different stance. It is this that I wanted to talk about and just simply share some what ifs. My intent is not to get you to question, challenge, or otherwise disagree with whatever it is you believe. [00:03:50] But once again, I'm naively optimistic that people will be open minded to what it is that I'm presenting. I'm also certain there's going to be people that do have some sort of an answer or possibly an excuse. [00:04:01] I'm not here to debate. I'm here simply to share and encourage thought. Because I think there's a different way of perceiving that whole situation and it helps explain some of what we now take for granted. [00:04:17] So if we look at the story, the basics of the story, this is Genesis 2, by the way. This starts if you're trying to refresh yourself in the way the Bible text had spoken about it. [00:04:28] Lord God had planted a garden in the east and Eden and put man. He had formed, made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground, trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. So there's two minimum. So it's a garden, but there's two minimum trees that were in play. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. [00:04:48] And apparently all the other trees in the garden there were multiple that had different fruits that were available for them to eat. [00:04:56] But this one tree, the knowledge of good and evil, for whatever reason, for whatever reason, was presented as basically the one not to partake, in, which I found very interesting. First, let's take a look at the trees. Right? The tree of Knowledge of good and evil is the one the serpent told Eve. If you partake of this tree, you will gain knowledge. And God knows that. And that's why he told you not to do it. Because he doesn't want you to gain that knowledge because you'll be like him right now. The Tree of Life, the tree of eternal life was never brought up at first. It was never raised. It comes up later, but not at first. I found that interesting. But also, she takes a bite. She feeds Adam. They suddenly realized that they're naked, and so now they are shy. [00:05:50] And apparently this shyness, this predilection to being covered comes from that initial awareness that they wouldn't have before. Well, what would happen if they had not partaken? They would basically just. Everybody would walk around and be freely naked. But later, when it's found out. So allegedly, according to the story, God is walking now. So this seems to go fly in the face of the idea that God is not a physical being. Because in order to be walking on the earth, you'd have to have some sort of physical presence. We would assume. So if he's a physical being, he's walking the earth at this point. Encounters. They were hiding from him because they were shy, that he encounters them, asks what happened? How do you know that you were naked? Who told you this? The Eve says, well, the serpent deceived me. And then apparently God gets completely angry at this. Curses, the snake, says to the woman, you will now your childbearing will be painful. [00:06:54] Well, this assumes two things. One, it assumes that there was always the intent to do childbearing the traditional way. The traditional way, of course, involves intercourse. If we accept that intercourse was always part of the plan, and we accept that pain was not originally part of the plan, and it came later as a result of this disobedience, and then says to Adam that basically you're gonna have to work for your food and it's gonna be backbreaking, painful. You're gonna have to suffer in order to get the food that you want to do. So we're told basically that God is so angry with them that he condemns them to a life of eternal suffering. [00:07:39] That's basically the story. Or at least as reads is the story. [00:07:44] And so they go out, and then there's various other things that happen that. That involve interactions with God. But this is the first experience that we're told. So then when you get into faith now, and we're told that you should be faithful to this being that has done that to your ancestors, that basically not only kicked them out the garden, but cursed them with pain and suffering that came down to you, but still expects you to go through it in order to survive that these trials and tribulations as it's referred to, that we take for granted as a natural part of life. [00:08:24] We have kind of turned that into. We should be thankful and grateful for that journey and for the suffering. If you believe that, great. I'm saying that I found it interesting that that was their default response is one of, we're going to put you through suffering because of this disobedience, because it gave you the awareness of what was supposed to be good and evil. And we in some way, being naked, was perceived as one of the two. Right. Because prior to that, they apparently either didn't know or didn't care that they were naked. I assume it's because they didn't know nakedness. They didn't know being shy. They didn't know these feelings. They couldn't even recognize them, couldn't even describe them. So if the knowledge was withheld from them, then the assumption of childbearing the traditional way seems to be intriguing because you would expect that there'd be at least some overlap in the knowledge, those two sets of knowledge. So that was one. [00:09:24] Now fast forward a little bit. [00:09:27] If we listen to that whole spiel, and you probably heard term wages of sin is death and certain other terms that all go into punishment. Everything is around punishment. Everything is around being punished for certain disobediences, not following the commandments, not doing these things. The Sodom and Gomorrah story, all of these things are around punishment for behaviors born from, presumably going by the story, born from this one event in the earliest form of humanity that then there was no choice. Apparently this could not be undone by the same being we're told later. The being can do anything, but could not undo this one action born from fruit. [00:10:14] And as a result, everybody has to suffer pain through normal life activities, but when they do certain activities that are trying to get away from the pain or avoid the pain or mitigate the pain, they're punished. Further, I got to thinking, it's like your perspective changes. [00:10:34] Is it truly that this being A, whichever side you're on, which being A, being A is on your side, looking after you, protecting you, you know, seeing to your needs, versus being B, that apparently is setting you up to fail, trapping you and everything else? Or is it a bit more simple? Is it perhaps that you are, from being A's perspective, you are expected to be oblivious, you're expected simply to follow orders. You're expected simply to be what they tell you to be. And being B wants you to be free and be your own person and thing. And Experience your own life and go through life at your own pace, understanding that you are accountable, whereas being a. They're trying to remove the account, they're trying to overprotect you. Right? [00:11:29] But because you resist that, there's a punishment. [00:11:34] Well, if you accept that, so be it. If you don't, so be it. It's just something to think about. It changes the perspective. It completely changes the perspective of what does that really mean when you say, you know, I worship this over here, I condemn this over here? Your perspective changes. If you knew that the person you're worshiping just wants you to experience pain. And if you've been taught to believe that the pain is to your benefit and you accept it, so be it. But is it really that? Or is the pain simply a replacement for doing it the other way, which is, let me stumble on my own. I don't want your protection. But you don't also. You also don't have to punish me and penalize me either. [00:12:19] It also got me thinking. Now this is the tinfoil coming on. The whole nature of the story is so specific in the activities and the behaviors and the punishments and everything. And obviously we don't know who really originally wrote the books, but what if. Just a what if tinfoil, what if it's actually telling a legit story that legit happened? And when we say that this being God was walking physically walking means it had a form, it had a physical form. [00:12:50] And if Adam was made in God's image, right. So we had a physical form, physical body, organs, like us. We presume the only difference then between that being and us was the lack of eternal life. Because that's what the statement was, is you have this book of knowledge of good and evil and the book of eternal life and the two different fruits, and they partook of one. And the whole reason Adam and Eve was kicked out was to prevent them from taking of the tree of eternal life, because that would make basically them gods. [00:13:25] Well, it's very similar, very close. Similar to kind of Greek mythologies and others, which got me thinking, what if. Just what if the story itself, even though possibly embellished slightly, you know, the idea of cherubim and the flaming sword, the cherubim part. Let's assume just an assumption that the story holds some truth. [00:13:48] Let's assume there was a being. Let's assume it did walk on two legs like we do. Let's assume that it at least somewhat visibly looked like us. Let's assume that the earliest phases of us could not speak. You know, to explain what's going on. We were very rudimentary. We didn't have languages, because that's a whole other contradiction is God breathed right into the lungs. God gave basics of language. But then we have the Tower of Babel story where all that kind of gets a wrench thrown at it. So we've never explained that. But let's take on face that all these things were given by the being up front. Suppose being a was a real thing, but wasn't necessarily a deity, at least not in the traditional sense, but rather an extraterrestrial. Right. That earliest forms of Earth extraterrestrial is or was responsible for the original, you and I, the original humans that walked the Earth. [00:14:50] Things like the flaming sword, perhaps that's a laser. Like these might be explainable events. These might be explainable situations. And it would explain at least how it is then that you have this physical something that's been changed in our anatomy. You know, the women have to suffer pain for childbearing, which made the assumption of natural forms of child rearing that, let's say it is an alien something. And they took that into consideration in wanting to create this society from something. Or perhaps they steered the course of society. [00:15:32] And those early folks would have perceived such a person possibly as a deity, especially if they were so advanced in the technology. I said, there's an episode of Star Trek, Star Trek Voyager where it's talking about how future state technology gets introduced. [00:15:52] They're traveling through time, and future state technology gets introduced to the people at the wrong time. I'm not trying to tell you that that's definitely what happened, but it's also something that helps explain some of the events that we hear about. The idea that there could have very well been some advanced form of something that was responsible for everything that then happened since, and that there's actually a logical explanation for everything that happened since that we can specifically point to, especially if they were doing oversight for a period of time until society kind of got off the ground. Because so many things happened in society, not just technological advancement, but the expansions. [00:16:32] So many things, different things happen that it causes you to wonder. It causes you to really consider and think about these things. And that came up again, this is one of those random things. I wake up, I'm like, okay. I think of the story and I'm like, well, wait a minute, why would that be a thing? And why would you praise somebody who was committed at the time to seeing you be in pain the rest of your life? And that all Your children are going to be in pain and you're just going to suffer, and there's never going to be an end to the suffering. You're always going to go through this because the painful childbearing never was apparently never going to end because it's still going on. Why would you subject somebody to that? [00:17:15] And if, if the intent was to make you appreciate something, well, certainly that would have been stated, but it wasn't stated, at least not that I read in any Bible version. I saw to. Okay, I'm doing it not because you're punishing you, but because I want you to experience and grow from the experience. None of that was ever stated. Whereas the snake, at least as worded, was trying to say that. Yeah, you know, you should. You should know what he knows. He. He's trying to keep you from it because he doesn't want you to know what he knows because he know you'd be on his level. He wasn't lying. Is it really deceit? Well, not really, but it's misdirection because there was instructions not to do it. [00:17:55] And then the question is, well, then why would you leave them in a garden with those two points of temptation except to test them? And if it's a test, a trial. Right. Why not phrase it as a trial rather than as a punishment? [00:18:11] Once again, I'm not trying to get you to think anything. And everybody that believes something is going to believe, regardless of what I say. These are things that just are thoughts, random thoughts that came to mind that I figured I'd put down in audio form so I can always reference it back and others can hear it. You can always hit us CasualTalkRadio.net@ the contact form. I don't know. It's an interesting story. It always has been an interesting story to me. And we've never been able to explain a lot of these things, but if you take and really think about the actions taken by the beings in the story, it does help shed a little bit of light potentially on some of our origins, what we are now, and how we react to these different stimuli, how we react to people who are overprotective, how we react to people who don't look out for us and whether we want that help. And most people are, let's say, attuned to oversight and being aided and being protected and being covered. And some, like myself, we chafe against it. It's not that we don't want to have a fair playing field. We simply don't want the overbearingness and we'd like the opportunity to make our own mistakes so that we can learn from them, hopefully. Obviously, the modern era struggles with retaining knowledge of the mistakes. You can learn from it. But I think there are different groups of people that react different ways, and it's not one size fits all. And that may be a reason why there's such a resistance to religion these days. Because the very nature of religion almost compels you to believe something that doesn't make sense to you either way. Right? If you believe, as I was saying in being a. You are accepting that this person, this being purposely, they're the reason you're experiencing pain and will always experience pain. Your kids will experience pain. They're the reason for your suffering. But you're supposed to worship them. Or if you believe the other side of that being me, this person who we know, this being that is misdirecting you, purposely causing you to do things that are, quote, wrong, and you're supposed to do that. And if you do that, then you are looked at as even worse and you're given all sorts of images. That's essentially more punishment. That means you're subject to a life of suffering no matter which way you go. It almost seems like it doesn't matter. [00:20:44] Again, the argument, the counter argument likely would be no, you're doing these things so that the suffering will end at the end of your life. And I understand, I'm saying, or suggesting at least, that if it's true, that the suffering ends at the end of life, and I'm not sure that it does, because if you leave people behind, you're suffering, you just don't feel it anymore. But you're making other people suffer too, because they're left behind. [00:21:13] You went earlier than them. We know this from Vivian Cash and Priscilla Presley and all the other ones where somebody else left before them and they're never the same. The suffering doesn't really end. It's kind of endless. It's never ending. [00:21:30] Perhaps people are tolerant of it now. I don't think that's it, but perhaps that's what it is. Perhaps we've simply gotten to the point where we accept suffering as a natural course of life. I would consider that sad, but maybe it's that simple. [00:22:00] Oh.