GENESIS I TREE OF KNOWLEDGE GOOD EVIL MORTON'S FORK ORIGINAL SIN THE 1619 PROJECT

CHRISTINE HALES, YALE, OLD TESTAMENT LECTURES

THIS IS NOT MY FIRST TIME AROUND THIS BLOCK. TRUST ME.

TAKE A SHOT

EAT: GODLIKENESS, SIN 

DON'T EAT: SIMIANNESS, NO SIN

EITHER WAY

MORTON'S FORK

Hales does not get into the analogies (She goes into the differences.) between the other Near eastern accounts, which considered humans to be the slaves of the gods, and this Morton's Fork situation. 

She claims that Israelite religion treated the relationship between the God of Israel and humans differently from these other cults for which humans were inherently unthinking and simian slaves of the gods, and the God of Israel where humans were characterized as deserving of and having respect and being made in the image of god. 

This is all rather disingenuous when you stop and think about the logic of the Morton's Fork of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. 

Such an offer might just as well have been made to the slaves by the gods of the other cults, and would have been no less a Morton's Fork for them as for the Hebrews.

Let's boil it down for you: Had the Hebrews been given no choice of fruit, they would have remained like other Near East cult slaves of their gods.

Being given the choice of fruit and taking it, they became godlike, but were nevertheless physically encumbered by all sorts of physical labors pains and disabilities tantamount to the same slavery the members of the other cults were under, and they had the additnional burden now of original sin which the other cultic slaves never had and would not want.

Let's put it this way: Would you want to be a happy ignorant of the knowledge of good or evil hard working slave chimp; or a toiling human who also knows he's really still a kind of slave but God does not call him that; he may be an evil human or what is called a good one (but not really), whose progeny nevertheless forever now inherit his deep unquenchable taint of original sin in the eyes of an all powerful God?

Trust me, the Cushites got an enormous load of original sin just for being fricking Cushites!

Moses lost control of the Temple to Aaron over marrying a Cushite.

"Oh, the Torah was written long after Moses."

Tell me something I don't know.