Not Morally Fibrous for Children

Upon arriving at Genesis 3:15, there are already a plethora of themes that arise. Even more interesting is that many of them are childish, sexist, or irrational. First, god punishes women by pain due to childbirth. Additionally, men will be the “master” of women; I guess feminism has been disproven by divine word. Ordained sexism aside, why would God place a tree of life or tree of knowledge if he wanted neither man nor woman to eat from it? Clearly man was not created in any image of perfection, for as soon as the first generation gives into temptation (theme: One wants what one can not have), we see murder within the second generation of human beings (theme: jealousy). On top of all this, it seems as though God incorporates beastiality for kicks; he offers every animal to man as a potential wife before arriving upon creating a woman (theme: beastiality is okay when a women is not present).

The consequences of all these events are indeed terrible. Cain is excommunicated from his homeland, women are given the pain of childbirth, snakes are reduced to crawling for eternity, and humans must work to survive. The irrationality in this punishment is that the descendents of the mistaken are being punished for what they had absolutely no control over.

“Every creature that lives and moves will be food for you” (Genesis 8:5). As an ESPM 40 student I must address the contradictions present within God’s depiction of life, specifically what insects constitute for humans. Man is indeed not the master of all life, not even life strictly on land. Bot flies are parasites that can burrow within humans as immatures and exit the eye socket as adults, causing blindness. Furthermore, there is an inconsistency in the depiction of all that was created. It is understandable a carnivore could exist before all plants, trees and shrubs were created, but it is illogical to say that there were herbivores, such as fruit flies, that existed before any decaying/yeast producing vegetation did.

Ultimately, the very beginning of this entire collection is filled with themes that lack complexity, and plot lines that were not well thought out.