I know what that male-created history says. God said you can eat of every tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I, being the thinker, immediately wanted to know—Why Not! That’ what thinkers do. They ask questions.
You’ll tell me that it was the snake that started it. In a way it was. When I got bored because Adam was off exploring other parts of the garden, sometimes the snake and I would play this game of “what if?” We’d make up these questions to help us explore reality. One of us would say, “What if gravity reversed itself and everything fell up rather than down?” Or another one I liked was “What if hippopotamuses could fly. They’d have to learn to speak, at least to say, “Look out below.”
So one day we were playing what if and the snake said, “What if we ate some of that fruit of the knowledge of good and evil?” I’d never thought about that before. I told the snake that I thought God said something about dieing if we ate of that fruit. But then I got to thinking like we theologians do. Who is God? From my own experience I knew that God was not mean or cruel, so how could a little piece of fruit from God’s good creation result in our death. And the snake agreed.
SMcCutchan