This morning I woke up to the most beautiful day, yet with the current state of the world (events over the last half year, and some events yesterday) an image of my Christian upbringing came into my mind - the scene after Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden of Eden, where there were angels blocking the gate so that they could not return to the garden.
In Judeo-Christian beliefs God created Adam and Eve, and I found this interesting article with the following quote:
From my viewpoint, a historical Adam and Eve is absolutely central to the truth claims of the Christian faith," says Fazale Rana, vice president of Reasons To Believe, an evangelical think tank that questions evolution. Rana, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Ohio University, readily admits that small details of Scripture could be wrong.
"But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you've got a problem," Rana says.
Rana and others believe in a literal, historical Adam and Eve for many reasons. One is that the Genesis account makes man unique, created in the image of God — not a descendant of lower primates. Second, it tells a story of how evil came into the world, and it's not a story in which God introduced evil through the process of evolution, but one in which Adam and Eve decided to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit.
The article also discusses how some evangelicals are grappling with coming to terms with a more scientific way of seeing the world, and that with an understanding of the science of genetics makes it clear that it is impossible that all of humanity descended from just two people. (This article was from 2011 -- read the article here.
Here we are in 2024 and the US is still very much under the influence of those who want to hold to the fundamentalist and strictly Biblical view in all things, with pushing for laws which are in alignment with their Biblical worldviews.
We could list out some very stark differences between Epicureans and Christians, such that they would be on opposite ends of a spectrum on several important issues.
Also, I wonder how the "myth-story" of Adam and Eve being barred from returning to Eden plays out in the minds of those who were taught this story as children (including myself). Is there is any subconscious retention of the idea that the earth is so imperfect and painful that there is no possibility of creating the pleasure and peacefulness of what existed in Nature?
Of course in Christianity there is the underlying story of how God created everything and that Nature is a subset of God...yet reading Lucretius/Epicurus helps us overcome this myth-story.