Seductive Gifts:
Damned When You Do
“When you set the
table,
When you chose the scale,
Did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail?
Did you make them tremble
So they would tell the tale?
Did you push us when we fell?”
-David Bazan, When We FellWhen you chose the scale,
Did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail?
Did you make them tremble
So they would tell the tale?
Did you push us when we fell?”
One
of the most common criticisms of God in the Genesis account is that of course Adam and Eve were going to eat the fruit. If God is all knowing, He
knew that Adam and Eve would sin, and so putting the tree in the garden was
essentially entrapment. To paraphrase Mr. Bazan, we were pushed and so we fell.
Since
this is not a theology article, we will skip the issue of whether or not the
Judeo-Christian God was being disingenuous. Instead, let’s examine a similar
story in which the gods were most absolutely being dicks: the story of Pandora.
 |
| "Screw you, Zeus." |
The Story
The
story of Pandora is also a familiar one, but let’s take a minute to review it.
After
Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to men, Zeus was a bit angry.
Chaining Prometheus to a rock and having birds peck out his liver every day
wasn’t enough. Zeus also wanted to punish the men (and at this point, all
humans were men) who accepted the fire.
So
the gods and goddesses created the first woman, Pandora, and sent her down to
men with a jar (mistranslated as "box") that contained all of the evils in the world. These evils are
similar to the ones released by Adam and Eve: toilsome work, sickness, death,
disease, and so on.
Naturally,
Pandora opened the jar because of course
she opened the jar and now there is evil in the world.
Unlike
Yahweh, who at least maintains plausible deniability, Zeus does not hide his
desire to see Pandora fail. He creates her specifically so that she will open
the jar containing all the world’s evils. Pandora, “the all-gifted,” is nothing
more than a mechanism for forcing humans to inflict Zeus’ revenge onto
themselves. It is the theological equivalent of “stop hitting yourself.”
So we
still have a clear choice – open the jar or don’t open the jar – but this time
the judging authority is pushing for an unavoidable fall.
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