Sin vs. evil ...kudos to Spark Notes

Naughty things that disrupt the social order vs. a lack of love

Sin/breaking rules/stumbling stone...but allows for knowledge

Seven Underlying Themes of Richard Rohr's Teachings Fourth Theme: Everything belongs and no one needs to be scapegoated or excluded. Evil and illusion only need to be named and exposed truthfully, and they die in exposure to the light (Ecumenism). A Warning to Religion From the Garden of Eden Meditation 42 of 52

The sin warned against at the very beginning of the Bible is “to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). It does not sound like that should be a sin at all, does it? But the moment I sit on my throne, where I know with certitude who the good guys and the bad guys are, then I’m capable of great evil—while not thinking of it as evil! I have eaten of a dangerous tree, according to the Bible. Don’t judge, don’t label, don’t rush to judgment. You don’t usually know other people’s real motives or intentions. You hardly know your own. The author of the classic book The Cloud of Unknowing says that first you have to enter into “the cloud of forgetting.” Forget all your certitudes, all your labels, all your explanations, whereby you’ve put this person in this box, this group is going to heaven, this race is superior to that race. Just forget it. It’s largely a waste of time. It’s usually your ego projecting itself, announcing itself, and protecting itself. It has little to do with objective reality or real love of the truth. If the world and the world’s religions do not learn this kind of humility and patience very soon, I think we’re in historical trouble.

We read the story of humanity’s original sin in Genesis. There Yahweh says, “Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:17). Now why would that be a sin? It sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? We were actually trained to think that way.

In the seminary we took serious courses on “moral theology” to help us rightly discern who was good and who was bad. Unfortunately, this usually only emboldened the very judgmental mind that Jesus warned us against (see Matthew 7:1-2). Some then thought that this was the whole meaning of Christianity—religion’s purpose was to monitor and police society in regard to its morals.

Religion became all about morality instead of being a result and corollary of Divine Encounter. As such, this was much more a search for control or righteousness than it was a search for truth, love, or God. It had to do with the ego’s need for certitude, superiority, and order.

Is that what Jesus came for? Jesus never said, “You must be right,” or much less, “You must be sure you are good and right.” Instead he said, “You must love one another.” His agenda is about growing in faith, hope, and love while always knowing that “God alone is good.”

I guess God knew that dualistic thinking would be the direction religion would take. So the Bible says right at the beginning, “Don’t do it!” The word of God is trying to keep us from religion’s constant temptation and failure—a demand for certitude, an undue need for perfect explanation, resolution, and answers, which is, by the way, the exact opposite of faith. Such dualistic thinking (preferring a false either/or to an always complex reality) tends to create arrogant and smug people instead of humble and loving people.

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  Ryan Robinson • 2 years ago

  I would take a similar perspective, largely aided by Greg Boyd's "Repenting of Religion." The difference would be that I think it is specifically about Knowledge of Good and Evil people. It isn't, in my opinion, about conscience or knowing what is good or bad for you to do, although it definitely helps to have some humility there, acknowledging you probably will do things evil in your life when thinking you were doing good.

  Instead, it is a check against the impulse to elevate some people as worth more than others, detracting from the God image in every single person. That is the root of "religion" in the negative sense as Boyd uses it: judging who is in and who is out, always trying to earn God's love and the Church's acceptance, setting up systems for how to accomplish that earning, etc. It is all based on assuming some gap between God and us when prior to this eating God is happily hanging out in the Garden with them and even after the eating God is still pursuing them; they are just too afraid because they are now judging themselves to be not good enough for God.