Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
I have had thoughts about this story about Paradise and the tree of knowledge in terms of maybe we should never have eaten of it, metaphorically speaking, because our knowledge, that which in these days makes us equal to gods in that we can create life and do very many and quite alarming things, but, lacking the wisdom of god or gods, we screw it up and Earth is no garden of Eden.
Knowledge is not evil in itself. It is only in our applications of that knowledge that we find evil. But willful ignorance is far more evil. Ignorance is the birthplace of the gods. It allows people to accept supernatural explanations for perfectly natural occurrences which they do not understand. The search for knowledge allows us to throw off the supernatural and understand how the world around us works. If you accept lightning as a punishment from a god, you are always going to find yourself at the mercy of the thunderstorms. But if you study it and learn its nature, you can protect yourself with a piece of metal and some wire! It's a pretty woeful god whose wrath can be deflected by a simple lightning rod!

But the idea that we are born sinful (agressive, brutal, 'red in tooth and law') I do not believe. Sometimes it feels like the discussion will have it that either we are all love and sunshine, or we are all brutes! I believe in neither. I think we started out simply doing what we had to do to survive, like all the other animals... I do not think we were 'born' with it - as in started that way as a species. But something happened.
Sadly, I have to go along with the idea that we are born brutes. I'm having the pleasure of watching my two granddaughters grow up, having the time to really observe them that I didn't really have with my own children. And I'm finding that children are greedy, selfish and cruel on their own. We have to teach them to share and not to hit others and that they can't have everything they want. We have the capacity to be good, but it is not innate within us. It's a learning process, lifelong.