[Vision2020] Say What?

[Paul Rumelhart]

heirdoug at netscape.net wrote:
> Let me first address your "imperative of blessing".
>
> Keely, When God told Adam and Eve to eat of every tree in the garden 
> but not to eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was this an 
> imperative of blessing or a command to follow?
>   

I know I'm stepping on your conversation, but this reminded me of 
something. 

When a powerful entity demands that you should, in essence, avoid 
learning how to distinguish evil from good shouldn't you be frightened 
and run away screaming?  What possible motive could this being have for 
not wanting you to know evil from good?  How could you possibly live a 
life of good if you never learned the difference?  It would be like 
living a life avoiding the color yellow when you could only distinguish 
shades of gray.  How could you even know that disobeying a command from 
this being fell into the "evil" category?  From the perspective of a few 
thousand years later I'm still not convinced of that.  You could only 
pull this one over on a couple of people that didn't know the difference.

It all sounds horribly suspicious to me.  I understand that the gnostics 
believed that the god of the Old Testament was evil.  I'm beginning to 
wonder if they were right.

Paul