First, welcome to the forum!
I am struck by human nature in general. People like to say religion is evil, but the problems I see are not limited to religion. It's a problem of what people do with the ideas and knowledge that they have. Do they use it to improve themselves? Do they turn it outwards to control and dominate people around them? (Turning ideas outwards can be good, but only if the inside is dealt with first.) It's like any tool. Give someone a hammer, and they can either build something with it or kill their next door neighbor.
I have seen the concept that perhaps God would have allowed Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge once they had further matured. (It seems pointless to put the tree there if he didn't have some kind of use for it.) Maybe that is why the knowledge was a bad thing: they weren't ready to handle it.
You have an interesting perspective. I hope you don't mind if I share.
Sometimes, I think of the adam and eve story figuratively. That is to say, there was no 'actual' tree, though your opinion still holds valid.
'Adam' and 'Eve' could be just another way of saying men and women. There were many of them, not just one of each. It would be a time where people were hunter-gatherers, and lived as just another species of animals. In most literature now a days, you'd hear this life-style being described as living in constant fear and survival being the most up in front of the mind. The general opinion is this life was extremely brutal, harsh, ravage and wild.
Yet the story describes adam(s) and eve(s) living in paradise. I think when you view most animals, while they do sometimes come under certain threats, most of their existence may be quite content and satisfactory. Not content as in everybody gets along and sings kumbaya, but content that they have the strengths and defenses to get by. It all comes without thought and works automatically and naturally. It was quite contrary to consistent starvation, and forever panicking about our morality. The mindset may have been so different that it's hard to describe.
The tree of knowledge is described as wisdom of the gods or maybe of how all things work. And with humans, something did change. It seems we started getting very fearful of almost everything. About if there is enough to eat, if enough people were having enough sex to advance the generations, about our security from pedators and thieves, about god, the universe, and our own life and death.
Evil problems springing out like crazy everywhere, and we attempted to fix them with farming and agriculture, building societies bordered of thick walls, moving rivers, locking our silos and hiring guards against thieves. Continually trying to obliterate the things that scare us, until sometime in the future, we will finally conquer death and live as immortal.
I didn't mean to hijack. Again welcome, I hope you enjoy our discussions.
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