Digitus Paternae Dexterae (Or Why Adam never Quite Touched God's Finger)
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. - John 3:16, King James Version
We who are about to die, salute you - old saying, attributed to gladiators in the arenas of Imperial Rome
I recently saw a movie called King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Surprisingly, despite it being Guy-Ritchie-does-medieval-fantasy, this was actually a damn good movie. Good enough that I won't even have to do a Skeleton of a Better Movie teardown on it, just a proper review.
Sorry, digressing again. Let's start over.
NOPICTURES ONLY SPOILERS
In that movie, there is an tyrant sorcerer-king whose biggest boosts to his power came from sacrificing people he loved. His wife and eventually their daughter, to be exact. Much is made of the pain he suffers from committing these heinous acts.
He is opposed by a young rebel known as "The Born King." The young man too is haunted by sacrifices of life and limb that his followers/fellow rebels make in his name. Much too is made of his pain regarding these weights on his conscience.
NOPICTURES WHERE AM I GOING WITH THIS? HUMOR ME A TAD LONGER
The contrasts are interesting, the similarities more so. The sorcerer-king in particular gets to a point where he seems to not even remember why he started on this path in the first place, just that the only way he can get through another day without blowing his own brains out or falling on his sword is to hope that, if he commits enough new atrocities to get to the end of his life-path, he just might redeem the ones he's already done. Sunk Cost Fallacy: burn the future to justify the past.
I mention this because I (also recently) read a post by a writer I respect greatly that attempts to explains the story of Adam and Eve and original sin through the lens of God having to let us fall that we may rise.
I HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS EXPLANATION - NOT THE PROBLEM OF EVIL BUT THE PROBLEM OF OMNI
You see, the trouble -- hahaha, okay, a trouble with monotheistic religions is all those damn omnis. You know, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent. They all come with implications that a great many writers of apologetics have either ignored, dismissed or outright never considered.
God, you see, does not labour under the same constraints as the rest of us mortal animals. Said constraints being, as we know, space, time, not-living-forever, eyes that can only see so far, brains that can only contain so much -- these are the bounds of mortal existence. The ambit of our senses, the reach of our hands, the range of our voices and the length of our lives.
Therefore, the difference between mortal action and God's action? Sacrifice. The giving of something you have for something you want to have or need to have or must have.
Sacrifice, to my mind, is unavoidably transactional: give of yourself and gain your desire. We as humans have to sacrifice to get what we want: time for knowledge, money for power, pain for strength, your life for glory, the world for your soul.
God doesn't.
Consider the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve. The serpent. The apple. Original Sin. What in the name of sanity was the point of all that?! You cannot build the maze, build the rats and then punish the rats for eating the wrong piece of cheese. That's not how fairness works. You're not supposed to do that. You can't do that.
Well, you can. If you're omnipotent.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I dod upvote but im a stinker as per usual. Why didn't they touch fingers? Dirty apples? Original Sinniness? He put it in eves nono instead? Also. If i were to build a rat maze i would DEF distract it with Sin Cheese. I think that's totally fair. But what happens when u escape gods maze? Does he let you touch his Godly finger?
I used to think the point of creation was that the entire universe was a giant algorithm for creating a new omnipotent entity. I figured maybe its how omnipotents get company -- or offspring.
Then thought about it some more and realized omnipotence either means exactly that or it doesn't. The only god worth worshipping is an omnipotent one; anything less is just a bad boss that you're trying to haggle into giving you a raise.
Not like that matters: an omnipotent wouldn't have had to create us in the first place.
As for touching the finger, maybe the great joke at the end is that we're supposed to pull it. The word endeth neither by bang nor by whimper but by silent-but-deadly fart.
Nopictures tag could be a thing. Help save data, use the Nopictures tag. Hehehe
Well, that is the entire point, yes 👍
Lol. That's cool
Hmmmm. I don't even know what to say. I'll have to read this twice or thrice and modify this comment. It's too much for me to handle now.
Modified.
The rats were warned about the wrong piece of cheese but they ate it anyways. The problem isn't with being not fair about the cheese but being obedient to stay away from the wrong cheese.
I can't explain much of these but don't just look from the rat point of view, but from the Omni point of view.
I still hail you, you are a good writer.
Ahhhh but that's just it: I am looking at it from the omni point of view -- and that is why it is so difficult for me to make sense of. The creator of the maze and the cheese created the rats. Knows them front and back, inside and out, beginning and end. Knew them before they were born. Knows the date of their death.
How then can the omniscient creator that knows everything about them turn around and be surprised that they acted in the way that creator knew they would act? Why test a creation you already know? If you don't already know it, does that then mean you are not omniscient?
You see my problem.
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Why didn't adam touch God's finger.. Hmm never really thought about it.. I am now though, good philisophical title
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