We dive deep into the Garden of Eden creation story from Genesis, analyzing the location, context, themes, interpretation and hidden meanings. We discuss the curses put on Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, original sin, the serpent, and more.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I had read this story as like a child I had, and I think this was pushed by like Bible conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. We didn't know where the Garden of Eden was. It like gives an exact location for the Garden of Eden.

But then the two other things that really like just chilled me when I was rereading it is why wouldn't God want man to have the knowledge of good and evil? Mm-Hmm. If it was evil to be nude, Then God would not have let them walk around the garden nude.

Is being nude really evil? No, it's not really evil. It is a social construct that man Tell the other man about what is evil.

 knowledge of good and evil, Is not knowledge like a perfect knowledge of what's right. And what's wrong because that's obviously something man does not have, Instead. Knowledge of good and evil in this context means man's ability to make decisions about what is good and evil So in [00:01:00] eating from that tree, Man took unto himself Through making a decision for himself. About what was good and what was evil? The tree did not need to be magic to impart the knowledge of good and evil and demand. It was him making a decision independent from God.

Malcolm Collins: So, when I read this, one of the curses that I could have sworn was put on man. And there is a reading of this, that this is one of the curses that was put on man, was to die. That before this, man would have lived forever. Not being allowed to

Eat from the apple that makes you live forever. It's not one of the punishments. It is a consequence

would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I am so excited to be here with you today, Simone. Likewise. You had done this thing recently where you're like, I'm going to go back through the Bible and reread it with this new context I have.

While also recognizing that when we've gone back and read scripture recently, it doesn't say what we remembered it having said, [00:02:00] like what I read growing up. It's almost like a Mandela effect thing. Like I am certain. That the, the, for example, the story that we're going to go over today, the story of Adam and Eve, I am certain I remember it saying that Adam didn't have to work in Eden.

And yet it very explicitly says Adam had to work in Eden. Yeah,

Simone Collins: his job was tilling the land.

Malcolm Collins: God breathing the life into Adam's Mouth, but he breathed it into Adam's nose. I, there are so many aspects of this story where I was like, what is

Simone Collins: going on? God doesn't do CPR right. Oh my goodness. Well,

Malcolm Collins: no, speaking of CPR, another thing I was amazed about was how similar the removing of the rib felt to modern surgery.

So, yeah,

Simone Collins: he sedated him, yeah. So it

Malcolm Collins: put him, he put him into a deep sleep. Yeah. . Then he cuts him open. Mm-Hmm. . He removes the rib. He takes out the [00:03:00] rib. Then he reseals the area that he cut with flesh. Yes. Yes. It was so weird. I, and I, and I read that and I was like, I remember like something more animalistic, like pulling it out or something like that.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Or just, yeah, just, you know, you know, like whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Not okay, we put him under sedation. We removed the rib. We so there were, but, but actually. It's not just that. The larger themes weren't the themes I remembered. And this is something that we get into in the next, in the upcoming track that we're doing this, this Friday.

Where you wanted to dig deep into the subject on the track, and I just haven't read it in a while, so I need to go back to it. Which is what's really going on with this story. Because, basically, the gist of the story, as I remember it, is Adam is in Eden with, with Eve and Adam doesn't have to work or anything like that, and a snake comes to Eve and Adam and tells them you should really eat this, apple of knowledge that you've been told not to eat.

And then Adam goes and he eats [00:04:00] the apple of knowledge. And God is mad about that. And then God kicks them out and curses you know, women to have pain and childbirth and. Men to have to work all of their lives for, for food. That was a gist of, of the story I remembered. That was not the story that I read for a number of reasons that I'd love to go deep.

But I'm happy to have you, you take a shot at this first, Simone. What really surprised you in your interpretation of it when you re read it?

 I was, I was definitely surprised by a lot of the things you were, I just thought that they walked around this perfectly maintained garden and just picked fruit off the trees and kind of enjoyed that.

Simone Collins: So that was surprising to me. And I was also surprised by God's warning as to why one should not. Eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In that, like he says, if you do it, you'll die. Whereas before I thought it was just like, no, no, no, don't do that. So that was interesting to me.

I was also surprised that there are kind of two big deal trees, right? There's [00:05:00] the tree of life and there's a tree of knowledge of good and evil and.

No one, no one really

Malcolm Collins: talks about the other tree. And there's another thing, so I had vaguely remembered the Tree of Life, but I had understood that the way it worked is that the Tree of Life kept a man alive forever, so long as he lived in the garden and was eating for the Tree of Life. It's implied in the story that that is not true, and that is not how the Tree of Life works.

If man ever once ate from the tree of life, he would live forever. So man never ate from the tree of life. He never touched the tree of life. Which also to me kind of implies that this being kicked out of Eden happened almost immediately within the context of the story. And that he had never eaten from that other tree either.

That he wasn't banned from eating from. Well yeah, I mean at the

Simone Collins: end it's kind of implied. that god is worried about him now eating from the tree of life because then he could

Malcolm Collins: live forever. No, but yeah, change that. Okay, so I'll go into the larger context of the story here as I re understand it. So first I want to give some quotes here that people might be surprised about.

The wet man had to work in the garden of eden. The lord god [00:06:00] took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it, to work it. He even, it even uses the word work very explicitly. He was tending this garden and it wasn't a garden that grew automatically. Another thing that was really interesting is it pointed out that plants, even magical plants in the Garden of Eden cannot grow without water.

And because it did not rain in those days, God had the water spring up from under the ground and then secede a number of times like a global flood almost, but like a small watering level before man was brought into this garden. To get it ready for man, but then after that man had to take care of it and it implies that at least part of taking care of it was the watering of it because this water rising and automatically watering seems to have stopped when man came into the garden.

So that was really

Simone Collins: Oh, I didn't pick that up, but I mean tending was definitely He has a

Malcolm Collins: job. Yeah, so the other big thing, and this is one that you really picked up on and wanted to pontificate on quite a [00:07:00] bit, is man was not tempted by the serpent to eat from the tree of good and evil. And it was not a tree of knowledge, it's very, every time it's talked about, it's the knowledge of good and evil.

It is a specific kind of knowledge, and I will delineate further later in this. It's not generic good and evil, it's a specific kind of good and evil. And this is something I didn't pick up on the first time I read it. But anyway so, uh, how, how did the serpent trick go through this part of the story?

Simone Collins: Right, so the serpent's nah, God, well, he, he approaches Eve and To her specifically says, Oh, you know that tree, you should try it. And she says, well, no, God said not to. And the snake's nah, God's full of s**t. By the way, God made this snake as well. He first made all the animals in the garden of Eden.

And I had forgotten this to help out Adam because God thought it was. Kind of mean to have Adam do all this work by himself, but none of them turned out to be really good helpers. So that's when he decided to make Eve. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: I, I read that part is meaning something a little bit more salacious than that. So [00:08:00] God put all

Simone Collins: of them knowing each

Malcolm Collins: other.

Well, yeah. So God put all the animals in front of man and he had them named them and then none of them was a suitable companion for man. Well, what is, what does that mean? Suitable companion? If a suitable companion is a woman. Well, no,

Simone Collins: but God said that he shouldn't toil alone. But for the man, there was not found a helper as his partner, a helper. And remember God, so at two 18, then the Lord, God said, it is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner. I mean, keeping this, this guy's working, he's trying to get him a helpful, helpful worker and, you know.

Danger noodles

Malcolm Collins: and what oxen are definitely more helpful than women plowing a field,

Simone Collins: right? But we don't know if he's plowing he is tilling I mean you could do it

Simone Collins: I mean, but like the quote's so funny. It is really funny that after God finds Adam and Eve and he gets mad at Eve after [00:09:00] asking what they've done he says to the man, because you've listened to the voice of your wife and you've eaten of the tree of which I command you, blah, blah, blah.

He then curses him. But that was Adam's problem was listening to his wife. And I think that's so funny. Like Eve, she, she succumbed to social pressure. It's the snake's fault. But Adam, Adam.

Malcolm Collins: Because you've listened to your wife.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you should have known better. Oh well, Adam.

Malcolm Collins: But I actually read this differently in context and I'll explain what I think the actual correct reading of this is in just a second. So, before I go further with this story, something I really want to talk about that was quite transformative for me is I am reading this story idly.

Right, I'm like, okay, I'm reading it, I'm trying to learn from it, and I can come up with hypotheses about what I think that this is supposed to be telling us, you know, as I believe God always tried to reveal as true a truth as he could to man when he was giving man true revelations, and it wasn't just, you know, pagan nonsense.

Right. And, and so, this I think was one of the true revelations, [00:10:00] and if it is one of the true revelations, then it should have contained as true a story as he could convey to early man, telling them some story. So the story that it seemed to me like he was telling, was the story of man Building civilization of the first cities of the of, of the development of human sentience and culture.

And so I read the story and something that just like immediately jumped out at me that was really weird. Is every time I had read this story as like a child I had, and I think this was pushed by like Bible conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. We didn't know where the Garden of Eden was. Like the Garden of Eden was at some magical place and some people hypothesized it's in Africa and Joseph Smith hypothesized it's in America.

And so like I, and I read it and it like gives an exact location for the Garden of Eden. And that shocked me to my core, kind of. I was [00:11:00] like, what? Yeah, because it

Simone Collins: starts with that. The Garden of before Adam even shows up, they're like, really specific about where it is. Yeah, so I

Malcolm Collins: should be clear what it says.

It says, The Garden of Eden is at the headwaters of four rivers. Two of the rivers don't correlate with rivers that we know about today. So they could have been streams or their names could have been changed. They

dried

Simone Collins: up. I mean, you know, geology

Malcolm Collins: happens. Whatever. But two of the rivers, we definitely know what rivers they are.

It's the Tigris and the Euphrates river. Well, we know where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers headwaters are. Like, it's not a vague thing. The headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates river. Hold on, I have to pull up the name of the, Is the Taurus Mountains in Southern Turkey. Okay? And I'll put this on a map on the screen.

Now, something really interesting happened. I was like, okay, if I am accurate. Is this, is this story about the development of the first human cities? And the development of, of Bronze Age man? Then I should look up, you know, this transition of man from being like an animal to being like a human as we think of him today.

I should look up, what's the oldest city that we know of today? [00:12:00] Hmm. And, shockingly, and this is one of those moments that I keep having when I'm looking at Bible stuff, and I'm like, whaaat? Shockingly, it's a less than two hour drive from the Taurus Mountains.

Sorry. I made a mistake here is actually in the terrorist mountains. It is not a two hour drive from the Taurus mountains. I was looking at where Google had put the pin for the terrorist mountains on Google earth.

Not taking into account that the Taurus mountains aren't an exact point on the map.

So it was exactly right as to where the first city was.

Malcolm Collins: This Accurately recalled. Now, keep in mind, this settlement was settled around 10, 000 years ago.

The, the oldest that we think that the story of Adam and Eve is, is maybe 5, 000 years old. Or 6, 000

Simone Collins: was what I was getting when I looked this up,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Yeah, so, so they were remembering something. About as far in their past as the writing of the story of Adam and Eve is from our past. And a pretty exact [00:13:00] location.

Now keep in mind, this was likely written by people in what is today Israel, or maybe Egypt, or maybe, maybe in Mesopotamia. But all of those areas are pretty far away from this location. The other thing that's really interesting is it said that when man left the garden, he left to the east. That was the direction that civilization spread from there.

Now, if you know your Bronze Age history, you know that this is where civilization spread. From this founding location that most of the early civilizations were in the East. Well, well, well. Then it has something that sounds like a very bizarre contradiction. At the beginning of the story, it said that God made the Garden of Eden in the East.

Well, if God made the Garden of Eden in the East and man left from it in the East, that makes no sense from the context of the original storytellers. That would have sounded like an anachronism. And yet, from the perspective [00:14:00] of most of the Judeo Christian followers today, the garden is in the east. In fact, there are very, very few Judeo Christian followers to the east of this area in Turkey.

So AKA Turkey ay. Turkey ay. Now, yeah. So he they changed their name for people who are wondering what she's talking about. That was really like chilling to me. And I think it, it shows this hypothesis of what I'm talking about is the God trying to explain man's early history. But then the two other things that really like just chilled me when I was rereading it is I had thought that man had eaten an apple of knowledge, right?

Yes. Apple of like knowledge of good and evil. And that always really confused me. Why wouldn't God want man to have the knowledge of good and evil? Mm-Hmm. , that doesn't seem to make sense. Mm-Hmm. . Right? I was like, I must be misinterpreting the story because I can't imagine God doing that. Yeah. And if you read the story like a child, it appears that that's what's happened.

But if you read it like an adult, you [00:15:00] recognize something. What does man do? The moment he eats the apple, he is ashamed by his nudity and so is the woman. And so they. Hide from God was, fig leaves, and then they, they want to wear clothes. Well, this is really interesting. Nudity. So, it said that this, this knowledge of good and evil, of the type the tree provided, God had.

If it was evil to be nude, Then God would not have let them walk around the garden nude. One would hope. If it was truly evil. Well, not one would hope, but it's said that God has this true knowledge of good and evil as well. God does a lot of weird things. So he also has additional knowledge to this. This is not real evil.

Is being nude really evil? No, it's not really evil. It is a social construct that man Tell the other man about what is evil. It is an evolved idea around what is evil, around social norms, and [00:16:00] everything like that. Yeah, this is

Simone Collins: like something we actively need to tell our kids. No, when we go outside, you do have to wear pants.

And I remember my parents telling me that, because that was kind of weird. So

Malcolm Collins: But, but, but this is critical, right? Because it now makes some other things make sense. We know that women in our society are much more prone to following social consensus than men are, and are much more prone to generating these types of

Simone Collins: sexual As is the case with Mr.

Danger Noodle, telling her what to do.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly, right? So we learn that, that you need to guard against this sort of social pressure that can come from your wives and from women in society. In a big way in society right now, I think that this is potentially one of the problems we're having is that the gender that is more susceptible to social conformity has equal power.

And I do want women to have equal power in society, but there are negative consequences towards this social conformity, and it can lead to virtue spirals and stuff like that. But let's talk about specifically the kind of evil that man engaged in, because this is so interesting. The evil that he engaged in [00:17:00] is a type of evil.

That is disproportionately engaged in within religious communities. It is following man's social norms, okay, above God's effort in the word of God. That is the type of evil that man ate here.

And it works perfectly for the If the theming of the story, if the theming of the story is about man first creating settlements, like small settlements that he was living in then and expanding out and creating the first civilization, the first cities, when man was living in the woods, he didn't have this form of evil, right?

He didn't have this form of good and evil because he was just living in small trial structures, right? Like they might've had some rules, but they were much less developed than what began to evolve in cities. The good and evil of cities. Is. the condemnation of walking around nude because it has negative [00:18:00] social consequences.

And I think that this has a bigger lesson to take away from it, and it's a very important lesson to me which is what society says is good is what is pro social. What society says is evil is what is anti social. Society tells us these things because those are the ideas that Promote the best interest of a general hedonist living in society, right?

If you were trying to promote aggregate hedonism within society, which is really just the maximization of the environmental stimuli that caused your ancestors to have the most surviving offspring. It is a thing of triviality. Those rules of good and evil that we live by in our society, that is original sin.

General utilitarianism is original sin. Banning pornography is original sin. These are the things that are original sin, right? Not following directly what is in the Bible, and only what's in the Bible is original sin. [00:19:00] And only God's will that is revealed through iterative revelation. And that was so transformative of me to get that understanding.

But.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that is so interesting because it's also nah. What anyone takes away from it. I've never heard anyone have that interpretation before Malcolm. So I find this very interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it also, you know, tells us a lot about starting civilization, right? Is that well, actually, this comes to the next interpretation, which is important to understand certain civilization.

So God. The concept of original sin, like eating the apple being original sin, I don't really get that from the piece. It doesn't really talk about sin anywhere. The snake tries to convince man to eat the apple because it says that it will make man more like God. And man wants to eat the apple because it will make man more like God.

A lot of the sin in what is happening here is a quest for God's knowledge. A [00:20:00] quest for shortcuts to God is being condemned here. Well, and that's

Simone Collins: actually something that really did surprise me from reading this again. I'm sorry to interrupt, but like when I read. 3 to 3 22, then the Lord God said, see, the man has become like one of us knowing good and evil.

And now he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever. And that's when he's Oh, we got to guard the tree of life. But he said, so the man has become like one of us. That's really interesting. Like you say, it's, it's more being on his level in a weird way,

Malcolm Collins: I guess.

So, what does this story mean? When it says the type of knowledge of good and evil that man gained is the type that God had. And that man in a way became more like God, when getting this type of knowledge of good and evil.

Would it clearly means in context is not knowledge of good and evil, like a perfect knowledge of what's right. And what's wrong because that's obviously something man does not have, nor was it something that he showed when he first like, Put on clothes to hide his nakedness from God. [00:21:00] Instead. Knowledge of good and evil in this context means man's ability to make decisions about what is good and evil in the same way that God makes decisions about what is good and evil. Without this knowledge or ability, what man thinks is good and evil or what man knows is good and evil is just what God lays out as good as an evil. Knowledge of good and evil in this context means knowledge of good and evil that contrasts. Or had the potential to conflict. With God's knowledge of good and evil. And what's really ironic and in a way, beautiful in the way this story works. It would mean that the tree. I have knowledge of good and evil didn't actually need to have any special or magical properties to it. To grant this ability to man. Because. Before he ate from that tree. What was good and evil was simply the rules that God laid out. But the only rule that God had laid out was [00:22:00] to not eat from that tree.

So in eating from that tree, Man already took unto himself when he reached in. Grabbed for that apple. That was when he was taking on to himself, the knowledge of good and evil. It wasn't biting the apple that gave him disability. It was the fact that he thought he knew better than God, about what was good.

And what was evil in making the decision to eat from that tree? And this readings interpretation is actually made pretty clear by the text by a rather odd remark that God makes That outside of this reading, doesn't make a lot of sense. that if you touch. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That's what leads to the consequences, not just eating from the tree. This interpretation actually completely fixes the problem. Of an individual saying, well then why did God put this tree that gave man knowledge of good and evil, but then banned [00:23:00] man from eating from the tree? Right. That seems like a very odd thing for God to do. There was never a tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden.

It was just a regular tree. The important tree, the magic tree. I was the tree of life. He didn't ban man from eating the tree of life. He banned man from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And he named the tree that because he knew in eating from that tree, man would take onto himself the responsibility of knowledge of good and evil. W a incorrect responsibility of knowledge of good and evil. There was never any deceit or trick on the behalf of God.

God just knew because he knows all things that will happen. You know, we believe in, predestination, That was the path that man would take. And that was the important role that, that completely non magical and regular tree would have in the history of reality.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so, but the other interesting one is the curses. [00:24:00] So, when I read this, one of the curses that I could have sworn was put on man. And there is a reading of this, that this is one of the curses that was put on man, was to die. That before this, man would have lived forever. That isn't exactly one of the curses it's put on me.

Still, let me take away from that. Hold on, hold on. I'll read the lines because it's, it's pretty interesting, but there is a way of interpreting this that that was not one of the curses. That was a consequence of eating from the tree of good and evil, but not one of the curses. So I will read the quote here that really makes it sound like a consequence.

And the Lord God said, The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat it and live forever. So, Lord God banished him from the garden of good and even to work from the ground which had been taken so if you see what's being said there, the being driven from the garden of Eden is not one of the punishments and not being allowed [00:25:00] to

Eat from the apple that makes you live forever. It's not one of the punishments. It is a consequence. It is somebody who has the knowledge of good and evil.

Cannot also live forever. You can't have both of these things at once. It's unless you are God. Now take our interpretation of how God works and how man works, right? Man is made God, eventually, millions of years from now, a God that lives outside of time through this cycle of intergenerational improvement, right?

Through this cycle of one generation, martyring themselves for the next generation. If man lived forever, he would not be able to improve fast enough or meaningfully enough to ever become God. This is why ultimate life extension, beyond just like health extension, is sinful. It is because it is to eat from the tree of everlasting life and stop this cycle of intergenerational improvement.

But it's another reading to this, [00:26:00] is that before man had the knowledge of good and evil before he had civilization, before he had what we would think of as cognizance or sentience, he didn't really understand death. As I've pointed out, it wasn't exactly that man never died in the garden. That's not exactly said.

It's that death wasn't meaningful to him in the garden. He, like all entities, pre cognizance, pre sentience, doesn't it really important to them in the way it's important to us, because they have kids and they understand that their goal is to have kids, you know, a praying mantis that has sex with another praying mantis and gets his head bitten off, to an animal sacrificing yourself for your children.

Is often a natural thing to do, or you don't even

Simone Collins: realize you're doing it. It just happens. So you don't

Malcolm Collins: realize you're doing it because death is not meaningful in that way. In a way, this knowledge of death and, and, and elevation of death as something of a poorer and something to be. Is part of the curse when you have this sentience, you also have death.

If you are going to be a [00:27:00] meaningful entity, God could not give us the, the, the the apple of everlasting life. And it's also important to note that this apple of everlasting life is a metaphorical thing. We know that because he put a. An angel guarding it with a flaming sword, and we know where this location broadly is.

Humans have been pretty much everywhere in the world, especially in Turkey. We would have run into an angel flipping about a flaming sword. So this is either not a location there anymore, or this is a metaphorical location at this point. I do want to read this, because this is the other part about God not exactly cursing man to die. Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and sissle for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground. Since from it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you will return. So by this, this is more that you will. Have to work to eat food until you die, not you're going to die and you [00:28:00] work

Simone Collins: and the work isn't going to be easy because he worked before he had a job before the, to the point where like he needed a helper and companion, but apparently it wasn't hard and now it sucks because there's weeds and they're spiky weeds.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, they're particularly difficult. And this gets really interesting to me. So in the following tract, we're going to be talking about something that humanity is facing right now. We call the trial of the lotus eaters. And I think what the trial of the lotus eaters is, what is causing demographic collapse.

is man having overcome these initial curses. Most men no longer spend the majority of their days working the field for food. In fact, most man doesn't really need to work that hard anymore to sustain himself. You know, there's people who live by dumpster diving, like freegans. This is a thing that exists, right?

For food women, isn't

Simone Collins: that toil? I mean. The, the thistles and weeds of the dumpster are the broken

Malcolm Collins: glass. The American man's struggle today to feed himself with the struggle of [00:29:00] our ancestors is, is frankly narcissistic in the extreme, bordering on the psychotic. This is like comparing a, a difficult day to the Holocaust or something like that.

Men have their children starve to death regularly in the winter. Yeah, that's true. You can't make that comparison. Quality of life is a lot better. Okay. So then the, the, the next thing is what women got as a curse. So women got two curses.

Simone Collins: No, they got a couple of curses there. They got four curses, painful child bearing.

So being pregnant, probably periods, et cetera. Just the whole process of being capable of it now sucks. Painful childbirth. So labor. sucks. Three. Oh, but you're still attracted to men slash husbands. So you're still going to have to go through all that nonsense. You are

Malcolm Collins: now attracted to men slash

Simone Collins: husband.

Yeah, but that was a punishment before it was punishment. Yeah. So, and the final one, and then the fourth is the funniest one. Cause it was basically subservience to men slash husbands. Like they will rule over you. Which they kind of, I mean like [00:30:00] higher IQ on average stronger you know, bigger in, in, you know, on pretty much every measure, you know, bigger brains, bigger muscles, taller height, like it's, which is, is I think very, very funny.

So maybe even pre Original Sin Eve was. Like beefier, you know, I wonder

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: maybe maybe but I I so I point something out about these these curses, right? Is is man's curse to need to work. The fields is no longer really applicable in the modern era Women's curse to have pain during childbirth.

We now have Epidurals.

Simone Collins: Yeah, we have epidurals. We have like pills where you can basically have a period once every three months or less. Yeah, I mean. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and

Simone Collins: women. You can transition. I mean, you can go on hormone blockers and just not become female.

Malcolm Collins: Does a man rule over women anymore? No, not really.

He's

Simone Collins: still smarter. What does Leah Thomas still beat the other women on the swim team? I'm sorry, Malcolm, [00:31:00] but I think you might be wrong

Malcolm Collins: here. Well, I think you're saying should man rule over women, but I'm talking about our social structure today. I would say that women have disproportionate institutional power today.

When, if you look at like the number of women who are graduating from university, if you look at in early jobs, not in like older jobs, but in early jobs women have largely overcome this man rule over this thing.

Simone Collins: Systemically, we're entering more of a ganography. Sorry, gunocracy phase.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and women what's the word that they use for, for woman liking her husband?

The, the, you, your desire will be for your husband. Is this women's, most women's desire anymore?

Simone Collins: Their desire will be for rom com fictional.

Malcolm Collins: Their desire is for the characters in Fifty Shades of Grey. The point being is I think that people look at this and they're like, this is man sinning by not having these curses apply to him anymore.

And I think that that is an incorrect reading. I think that [00:32:00] God. Is a smart God. He knew we would develop technology. There is no technology that we have, that is not, two planes and a helicopter, I mean, two boats and a helicopter, I always come back to this people who aren't familiar with the story a guy like a flood's coming.

He says, God will save me. A boat comes to try to save him. He sends it away. He says, don't worry, God will save me. Another boat comes. He says, don't worry, God will save me. A helicopter comes. He says, don't worry, God will save me. And heaven, he goes, why didn't God save me? And he goes, what do you think the two boats and a helicopter were for?

God, you, you, it is extremely arrogant for God to demand that for man to demand of God that his miracles appear in a format that is suitably thalmatological for him. God's miracles are most shown in the modern age through logic and reason and man's, the gifts that God gave man's ability over nature.

I believe that God did intend for us to free ourselves from these individual curses and that with this freedom, he showed Why these curses weren't the curses that we thought they were. [00:33:00] Why we showed that actually these curses were kind of for our own good during the early days of civilization. Because as soon as we freed ourselves from them, we were no longer able to motivate reproduction.

And we were no longer able to motivate the intergenerational continuation of culture. And we are about to go through something that we will call the in our next trek, the trial of the Lotus Eaters, which is a trial that is a direct response to the resolution of the curses that were put on us in this story.

I do not like the term original sin because I do not believe this story talks about sin. It talks about mankind separating for a place where he could be one with God, i. e. a place before he was sentient, a place before he was cognizant, a place when he was more like the lower entities. And it also warns us against listening to the rules of man over the rules of God.

And when you say, what does God command of us? Intergenerational improvement, the expansion of human potentiality, because that is how we eventually rejoin God. All other readings of good and evil are either Textual, so [00:34:00] if they're textual, they're good. Or they are just things that promote general utilitarianism in society.

And that is this sin. The sin that is being warned against in the Garden of Yeah, that's my,

Simone Collins: that's my favorite interpretive conclusion that you made of all this. Is that the, the sin is deviating from truth, from logic, from God. And succumbing to social pressure. And that's what this is all about. You know, Eve listened to the snake, Adam listened to Eve.

And then they, you know, got self conscious and then all of these actions. removed them from God. And that's like clear that all the things that went wrong was stuff that removed them from God based on social pressure. So the moral of the story, boys and girls is don't succumb to peer pressure.

Just say no.

Malcolm Collins: But peer pressure undersells it. When people hear peer pressure, they think about These little things in society, right? Like they think about being peer pressured into drugs or something like that. [00:35:00] It's a much bigger form of peer pressure. It's the peer pressure of wearing clothes. Okay.

It's not saying go around as a nudist, but to recognize that there is no intrinsic good or evil to wearing clothes. There is no intrinsic good or evil to a lot of these things in our society that are stop gaps, that are rules that we create to promote pro sociality. And that to elevate justice. This human idea of good and evil that developed in these first settlements and these first civilizations is to elevate the highest order of sin.

It is a hard, a very hard rule and, and lesson to follow. It's not the easy, don't succumb to the peer pressure. Of randomness. It's don't succumb to the peer pressure of your church when they say something like pornography is sinful if it doesn't directly say in the Bible that pornography is sinful.

Well, also because coming to church

Simone Collins: often is like a matter of life and death. If you get thrown out of your village or whatever and there's no food

Malcolm Collins: to be fed. This is the question. [00:36:00] Are we commanded when we see truth that other people don't see, are we commanded to say that truth? Are we commanded to teach that truth?

And I believe that we are within a narrow subset. So we are to the people who are capable of hearing it, but we should not out ourselves in a way that leads to the, the, any sort of danger for people in our community. And this matters a lot when we end up talking about some of the mistakes I think specific Abrahamic faiths make.

And this is something that we'll talk a lot about in future tracks, but I think that a lot of people have this belief that if something is done in the name of God, It must be what the God of the Bible suggested that we do. And yet we see constantly throughout Christianity, throughout Judaism, throughout Islam, elements that were sort of pop paganism or pop culture of the time, accidentally working themselves into these religions.

And when these things worked themselves into a religion at a time of antiquity, it can be uniquely difficult to sort the lessons of [00:37:00] God from the things that were just. I don't know like Canaanite culture, for example and so, it's something that is really important to look back through these stories, whiz, and say, do these stories have predictive power?

Do like, where, being able to point exactly where the earliest city is, right? Do they, do they teach important lessons? Or are they The accidental adaptation of some nearby pagan culture and it's, it's, it's critical, I think, for the advancement of humanity that we do look at textual sources with this critical eye and understand that they are not immune to the tampering with, I mean, we, we, we see this today, you know, people today point out they, they worship there's these, these Catholics in Latin America who worship Santa Muerte which is an unofficial saint, which is a red robed human skeleton that is paraded around town and you pray to it for things like what's an example?

All the naughty stuff you shouldn't pray to Jesus for. Yeah oh, I want sex or I want this person dead. [00:38:00] I'm really mad at them. And they're like, yeah, but we'd be embarrassed to pray to God about this. And you know, she's a saint of the people. And it's Bro, if you can't tell that what you're worshiping, like I know what that entity is.

That's a very obviously to me, not in a team. They're like, no, but we're doing it in the name of God. She's an intermediary for God. Just saying this is replacing, you know, taking a pagan script and replacing the God's name in it was, was Yahweh doesn't make it sanctified no matter when it happened, but we'll get to this later.

Anyway, I love you to death Simone, because I don't want to be too offensive in this episode. And this, this other episode is when we have to do a lot of. thinking about and a lot more study on because it would be very offensive when I point out the bits of Abrahamic faith that I think are actually borrowed from other belief systems that are

Simone Collins: satanic worship.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think, I don't believe in satanic worship because keep in mind to us, actually, this is a final sort of wrap up point on this story. The basilisk to us is part of God to believe Satan is something [00:39:00] separate from God that can genuinely resist God's will is to be a polytheist. Satan cannot challenge God's will.

It is a facet of God. And so. The, the snake tempting Adam and Eve was not some entity in absence of God. It was God tempting Adam and Eve because he knew what needed to happen. God uses Satan to tempt us to do the things that we need to do to move forwards. And, and, and that's what he's doing in the trial of the lotus eaters.

He is. Sterilizing, memetically sterilizing a huge portion of the population. That is his evil side. The

Simone Collins: Basilisk Well now feel free to take this part out, but I mean, there is this whole thing where God also punishes the snake and he has to crawl upon his belly and women are going to hate him and he's going to hate women and there's Well,

Malcolm Collins: I would actually word this a little differently.

So as I said, I believe the Basilisk is an element of God. Right. Like the, the, the, the Satan is an element of God. And I think what you could see here, because and we [00:40:00] talk about this a lot in a future track, and this actually requires a lot more reading, is most of the Abrahamic faiths describe this element of God as having some degree of autonomy and being in, in some degree of antagonism with God.

And so what it might be is God. The overarching god feels, I guess you could say if I was going to anthropomorphize it, some form of antagonism with this aspect of himself that must tempt man. And he doesn't like that this aspect of himself exists and he knows it must exist. He knows that these are things must, man must do to go down the path that we need to go down, but he is angry with himself for that and for that reason he punishes this element of himself.

And I think that that's what we're seeing there. And I think that throughout the scripture, we see that in a way, God forces the part of himself that has to punish and test man to live sort of a worse life than the rest of God to live in some form of [00:41:00] deprivation. And I believe that it. Is the cursing of man that causes deprivation to this because I don't believe that God in any way means to hurt a really challenged man.

He just knows he must for a man to improve himself. And this comes, you know, one of our more important teachings is don't interfere with the bas in its role. Removing temptation from man does not strengthen man. It weakens man. We must allow this aspect of God to tempt a man and it's up to individual men and individual cultures to overcome this.

That is how. God ensures that we are moving on the path that we are meant to move down. Well, like any

Simone Collins: good parent, he'll set out boundaries. And if those boundaries are crossed, he has to follow through the consequences. That's actually a great

Malcolm Collins: way to put it. The part of us that punishes our kids, we hate that part of ourselves.

And yet we know we must do it. Yeah. And if you don't, then you become a bad person. You begin to enjoy the punishing of, of, of your children or something like that. Right. And I think that God doesn't want that for himself. And [00:42:00] that's why you have this degree of autonomy set up for this entity. Anyway,

Simone Collins: Well, I have this to say, I love you too, but as we just learned, That's because God punished Eve and so my love for you, my desire for you is divine punishment.

I noticed I don't have desire for you. No,

Malcolm Collins: no. I wasn't punished with that. No, no, no. God

Simone Collins: forbid. No, no. You, you, you got in trouble for listening to me. Big mistake. So, you know, I guess my love is not legitimate. It's because God did it. So anyway, sorry. I'm sorry. Snake made me do it. Something, something.

I'll stop recording.

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