[MD] Intellect in the Bible?

[John Carl]

Hey Arlo,

My read on the fruit representing objectivism isn't a modern read, it's what
the text actually says...

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:
for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

"knowledge of value (good and evil)" = "definition of Quality"

God and Pirsig both say, "no"

That's not a modern reading.  That's just what it says with no construing
needed.

Although Pirsig doesn't threaten anyone, he does equate SOM with the "death
force".



On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:

> [John]
> Sorry, RMP, wrong.
>
> [Arlo]
> Actually, I think Pirsig has this one right. There are, to be sure,
> intellectual-responses to the social patterns of "religion", of which Joseph
> Campbell stands out for me. I think you are confusing the idea of "intellect
> as being able to think" and what Pirsig terms the intellectual level.
> Clearly, humans being "thought" tens of thousands of years before. This
> social-mediation of language-symbols is, I agree, the pre-eminent
> distinction between "man" and other biological creatures (although I do
> think, in disagreement with Pirsig that other biological creatures do
> evidence some forms of social-symbolic mediation, but none even close to the
> level of complexity witnessed in human activity).
>
> Your "read" of the Garden of Eden is a modern intellectual response to
> interpreting the social-mythological symbols earlier man had created. But
> where you see it representing an adoption of Objectivism, I'd argue the
> story is an analog to sexual reproduction. In Eden, they are told not to eat
> of two trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. They eat of the
> tree of knowledge and the first thing they "understand" is sexual
> reproduction, they see their sexual organs as a means to reproduce, or more
> poetically "to create life". God expels them before they can eat of the tree
> of life, which would grant immortality. Indeed, interesting to consider is
> that they are told the reason God has forbidden them from eating is that he
> knows doing so will make Adam and Eve "like God"... immortal and able to
> create life. It may also allude to the need for mortality in a reproductive
> world, lest the world become in short order so overcrowded as to be "hell".
> But this type of intellectual reconsideration of the social symbols used by
> earlier man to mediate his daily activity is not contained within the Bible,
> any more than the tally marks on bones indicating an awareness of "quantity"
> meant that those who carved such marks were thinking mathematically.
>
>
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