10 



that they would not die if they aite the fruit, but that, instead, they 

 would become wise ; and eventually he persuaded them to eat. Who 

 spoke the truth, god or the devil ? Did the man and woman die on 

 the day they ate the fruit ? Far from it. That day, were there any 

 truth at all in the narrative, would have been the grandest day ever 

 known to man ; for by the eating of that fruit was made known to him 

 the difference between good and evil, that he might be able to seek 

 the one and avoid the other ; his benefactor being the serpent, or devil, 

 the circumventor and conqueror of god. 



But notice further on how impotent this so-called almighty deity 

 really was. He exclaimed in fear, " Behold, the man is become as one 

 of us [which was precisely what the devil predicted] to know good 

 and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree 

 of life and live for ever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from 

 the garden." Now how easy it would have been for an omnipotent 

 creator to have annihilated his own work, and thus cleared the way for 

 a fresh start. It would be interesting to know who the " we " were 

 that the writer refers to, if not an androgynous deity or a multitude of 

 gods or goddesses. 



What was the consequence of this sin of Adam and Eve ? Every 

 man and every woman ever born upon this earth is guilty of this sin, 

 and will eternally burn in hell fire, says the Christian church, unless 

 they believe that this circumvented god became a man, lived on this 

 earth, and died the death of a criminal, in order to give satisfaction to 

 himself for the outrage committed on his divine majesty by three of 

 his creatures. The countless myriads of human beings who have in- 

 habited this earth during the six thousand years (according to Bible 

 chronology) that the world has existed, are all and each under this 

 fearful curse, although they had no more to do with Adam's sin than 

 the man in the moon, and had no power to prevent it. These people 

 have been brought into the world, whether they liked it or not, and 

 are subject to this penalty, the enormous majority of them being inevi- 

 tably doomed t) eternal torment ; for there have lived many millions 

 of people who never even heard of the Bible, its gods or its scheme of 

 redemption. We may go farther and declare that all are inevitably 

 doomed, for we cannot conceive that anyone can believe suoh a story 

 as that of the fall No one will venture to assert that infants and idiots 



