In the West, Christianity (through its many factions) has held women’s status down for millennia. Their religious claim of women’s rights being less than men’s find its roots in one of the first Biblical stories: Adam and Eve.
That story told in Genesis has a big problem: it makes no sense. It might make sense, if we knew the actual story it’s trying to tell, but we don’t.
Genesis is so metaphorical it’s not wholly useful. At the surface level, it offers little except as a hint toward something deeper: taken literally it’s a non-starter.
So, I’m going to tell you a version of Adam and Eve that does make sense and show what it means for women.
Three quick pieces of backstory
To begin, my source isn’t the Bible, it’s The Urantia Book. You’ve never heard of it, trust me. It’s a long book about religion, science, and philosophy. If you want to find out more about it, I wrote a short intro to it here.
Second, God created the cosmos and everything in it. We are not an accident. But he didn’t do it the way the Bible describes. Instead, he used science, evolution, and a big team of angels. Science was used to create the cosmos, angels planted divinely-designed DNA on Earth (along with the spark of life), and evolution more-or-less handles the rest.
Third, from time to time some angelic team members take a human form and live a human life to help us directly. Adam and Eve undertook such an assignment. So did Melchizedek. So did Jesus. There were others too, but I’m guessing these three are most familiar to you.
Any questions? If so, please see the 2000-page Urantia Book. Clear it all up in a jiffy.
Now on with the story.
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve weren’t the first people on Earth. Remember the spark of life and DNA? Those were placed on Earth millions of years before A&E, so when they show up there’s already a relatively small (but growing!) population of humans on the planet.
A&E have several goals to achieve on Earth, but we’ll focus on just one for now: the cultural and biological improvement of the human race.
Upon arrival, A&E were given angelically-designed and created bodies — not evolutionary ones. After all, the angels designed the Earth’s original DNA, so making near-perfect material bodies for A&E is no problem. Their bodies and their DNA were vastly superior to evolutionary human DNA.
For example, they were immune to a huge variety of natural diseases; their children could intermarry and have children without genetic diseases, inherited deformities, or dysfunction; their natural lifespans were a multiple of native human lifespans, and so on.
The improvement plan involved A&E (and their generations of pure-line children) living and having children together until they were numerically equal to the native human population.
At that point, they would begin the very long, very slow process of marrying humans, having children with them, and raising blended families. This blending would combine not just DNA, but also combine human culture with the peaceful and spiritual culture brought by the descendants of A&E.
This merging would dramatically improve the total quality of the human race on many levels. Eventually, every human being on the planet would find a life partner in a descendant from A&E. At that point, the plan would be completed.
But things didn’t go according to plan.
Genesis did get some things right.
Default from the plan
As you can imagine, creating an entire race from one couple takes a long time, even if each member of the new race can live for hundreds or thousands of years. Patience was very important.
But a hundred years into it, there was little progress to show. Both A&E started to get impatient, but Eve in particular took it to heart. She wanted to speed things up, help the plan along, and make her own unique contribution. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened.
And Lucifer was happy to “help”.
Lucifer?!
As if things couldn’t get bad enough all by themselves, Lucifer enters the scene.
As the universe’s first atheist, Lucifer launched his rebellion against the idea that God existed. He recruited as many angels as possible to his cause and dedicated everyone to resisting, undoing, or dismantling any plans undertaken in the “fictional” name of God. And that included a better humanity.
While the Great Deceiver wasn’t personally present on Earth, his associates were. At first, they tried communicating directly with A&E, selling all manner of dubious “improvements”, but that was too obvious. Their direct involvement raised so many red flags it made the pair immune to all their suggestions.
So they tried a flanking maneuver and concentrated just on Eve. They worked through an unsuspecting human chieftain, one from a tribe who was especially friendly and trusted by A&E.
“Hey Mr. Chieftain, Eve has a good idea to make The Great Plan go faster. She needs the help of a trusted friend. You want to help her, don’t you? Wouldn’t you like to make a special contribution and earn a place of honor? Of course you would!”
It took years to make progress, but over time Eve and the chieftain held many private meetings to discuss their little enterprise.
Eventually, the true-believing and utterly sincere chieftain convinces Eve nothing can go wrong with good intentions, especially when they’re aiming at the best outcome. Through flattery, persuasion, and enthusiasm, the chieftain convinces her.
In effect, Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome seduces her. Before she could entirely realize what, precisely, is happening, the plan is consummated.
Eve is pregnant with the first blended-DNA baby.
Realizing what happened
Almost immediately, the angelic hosts on Earth know something is amiss. Adam, with his spiritual sensitivity, picks up on it.
He asks Eve to meet with him to discuss what’s going on and hears for the first time the private story of the closed-door meetings she had with the chieftain and the secret project they devised to add their individual contribution to the overall plan.
Eve had defaulted from the original plan that she and Adam agreed to follow. The first blended child will arrive soon, but there wasn’t a blended family in which to raise him.
To give kids the best chance, stable, blended parenting relationships were supposed to precede them. Parents from different cultures needed baby-free time to resolve the many problems of cultural differences and agree on a unified approach. But that wasn’t going to happen.
What would Adam do now? What would all of A&E’s children do now? Should they just go ahead with the plan, before they had enough people? Should they wait? And what about the new baby that Eve is carrying, conceived far too soon?
The improvement plan was wrecked even before it began. The counseling angels who had helped A&E formulate the strategy, to whom they swore their allegiance, could no longer help them. Since they departed from the long and carefully crafted plan, the one to which everyone agreed, A&E must now carry on with their purely personal plans as best they could without any further angelic guidance or help.
Well, Eve had to carry on anyway. Adam was free to relinquish his assignment and return to his previous angelic status since he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Yet.
Adam’s choice
Adam faced the gravest decision of his Earthly career.
On one hand, he hadn’t done anything wrong, he could retire from this angelic commission. But the consequences were immense.
Earth would no longer receive its full measure of biological and cultural improvement, and this lack would echo through countless generations. The path toward a better humanity, improved culture, and a more humane world was now much darker, and more perilous.
Just as he was tempted to withdraw from this mission, so were all of his already-born children tempted as well, and eventually, about two-thirds of them would withdraw. Little could be seen down the path of staying loyal to the mission and his mate, except extreme hardship and hope against hope.
On the other hand, Eve was the love of his eternal life. They had been together for millennia before arriving on Earth, and he cherished her with a super-mortal affection.
As strong as Adam was in both heart and mind, the thought of separating from his beloved for untold years to come, to live and work in the broader cosmos as a solitary journeyman until she completed her lonely time on Earth, was simply more than he could endure.
“It was in the despair of the realization of failure that Adam, the day after Eve’s misstep, sought out Laotta, the . . . woman who was head of the western schools of the Garden (of Eden), and with premeditation committed the folly of Eve. But do not misunderstand; Adam was not beguiled; he knew exactly what he was about; he deliberately chose to share the fate of Eve.” — The Urantia Book, 75:5.2 (843.4)
Eve didn’t trick Adam. She isn’t the seducer, the leader of men into evil. That entire narrative is false.
She did commit and error, and it had terrible fallout for all involved, but once she could see clearly, she disclosed everything to her partner and squarely faced the consequences, like the brave woman she was. There was no deceit, only that most human of all things: mistakes.
Adam saw her as his equal in life, in love, and in their work together. After fully comprehending the situation and all its ramifications, he joined her, of his own free will.
He believed she was his equal, not merely because he loved her so, but because it was true.
Demolishing the fiction of women’s inequality
Many tragedies have grown out of fossilized interpretations of the Bible, but the inequality of women is especially heinous.
What society would consciously handicap the contribution of fully half of its members? What civilization would knowingly hamper themselves by confining the intuitive, emotionally strong, and strategic thinking members to any position of less-than-full status?
Rhetorical questions, I know.
Time for all that to change.
There are no historical grounds for the suppression of women’s status. There is no spiritual basis for it, no logical support for it, no emotional or intellectual scaffolding that can bear the intolerable weight of that atrocious fiction.
There is no cause for it. Period.
The Edenic ideal embraced the full participation of men and women in the adventure of living. Adam gave Eve his complete measure of trust before the default, then again after it happened.
Why?
Because he knew how valuable she was; because he knew neither of them could make it alone; because a true team doesn’t hinder, constrain or thwart its members.
If we would live up to that spiritual ideal embodied so long ago, we should strive to do no less.
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