Catastrophe in The Garden
In Black Players, the Milner’s epic anthropological doctoral thesis (Little, Brown, 1972) exhaustively documenting the culture of pimps and prostitutes in Los Angeles, is a quotation “When man let Eve tempt him into taking the apple, he gave up his manhood, and today man is fighting to regain it.” How it happens that such wisdom should be the premise of pimps and prostitutes and not the rest of the population or of pastors, theologians and other Biblically-literate persons bears examination. To do this, one must take the trouble to examine the Bible passage that tells this story very carefully and with an intuitive perspective, because the actual words are not there. Only a comma, followed by a space, during which the greatest catastrophe in human history occurs, followed by 6,000 years of confusion, mayhem and misery in the place of what was intended by The Creator to be a perfectly harmonious and pleasant life for men and women as married couples. Can it be that this monstrous event has gone unaddressed and uncorrected for the entire span of recorded human history? The reader is encouraged to consider where and when they may have heard of this, because the present writer has never heard nor read any mention of it.
One occasionally sees a bumper sticker proclaiming EVE WAS FRAMED. This confronts the erroneous notion that The Fall was Eve’s fault, when in reality, The Fall did not happen because the first woman was tempted and ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil nor because she turned around and tempted the man. The Fall happened because the man allowed himself to be tempted and fell for the deception transmitted from the serpent through the woman to him. The Fall is the man’s fault, not the woman’s. The woman is understood to be the weaker vessel, thus may be excused for having been tempted.
At this point our attention is directed at the man and what he did – or did not do – to precipitate the next six millennia of human misery. In Genesis where it reads
“The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”
Did you see that? It is in the blank space between “…tree,” and “and…” quite appropriately depicted by a blank space that we must visualize the event. Please, dear reader, what do you see, or not see? What the present writer sees is an act of stupefying cowardice wherein the man fails to assert himself as a man and simply goes along with the serpent’s and Eve’s malevolent suggestion. Once more “… she gave me of the tree, [and I wimped out] and I did eat.”
Almost every woman who has lived since this event 6,000 years ago has been aware of men’s weakness and inability to withstand even so slight a temptation as this, and takes full advantage of it. They think we’re all sniveling wimps, and so have nothing but contempt for us.
Still wondering where all of the spousal abuse, adultery, pornography, prostitution, homosexualism, pedophilia, feminism, incest, and every imaginable perversion and corruption of the “natural use” of the male-female relationship originated?
Not anymore. When we ceased to be strong and stand up to temptation, we ceased to be men.
The rest, as they say, is history.