[MD] Intellect in the Bible?

[Arlo Bensinger]

[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.