Thread: The Bible: Both literally and figuratively

Imagine if you will for a moment that the Bible is a metaphor. The story of Genesis I'm sure everybody is aware of. I propose it really is the story of creation, and also the story of children, the children being Adam and Eve, of course. Now let me explain.

The fruit of life and the fruit of knowledge/wisdom are a metaphor. When we are born as children, we merely bear the fruit of life, we do not possess knowledge, just like Adam and Eve. The serpent that tempts them represents adolescence and discovering their sexuality and the fact that there is in fact good and bad in the world. The serpent was always there lying in wait, it was unavoidable, they had to grow up. Once they gained knowledge and thus, adulthood, along with it came responsibilities and awareness. They realized they were naked, that they must defend and protect themselves from outside forces. The Garden of Eden is what we call childhood, and as a price for growing up, they had to leave it behind, never to return. For now they were like God, they could tell right from wrong. With this came responsibility, the responsibility for continuing life on earth and preserving the future so that our children could continue to live better, more advanced and enlightened lives than we do. We were given physical bodies to do this.

On the topic of physical bodies, we were shaped in God's image, and by that it is the same as what one says when you are an architect and you build a building in your own image, it is one you created in your mind. We are the mental picture that God had that represented himself, a system that sustains itself by the forces around it. Things can kill you, but if you are creative enough, if humans live long enough, we can achieve maintaining our physical bodies along with our mental selves, our souls, so to speak. He wants more for his children than what he could have himself, and he enjoys merely being able to watch the seeds he planted become large trees that live for centuries. God may even be capable of dying, but through us he could live on forever in our memories. We are imperfect beings like he, though not as powerful, that with his help can become more than what He was and is. Not now, not for a long time, but some day.

As far as the story of breaking off one of Adam's ribs to create Eve, it lends to the idea that God's first creation was children. He intended there only to be two children that could live happily forever, and there enters the picture of Lilith. Lilith was meant to compliment what Adam wasn't, which was more or less a truer copy of God himself, which shouldn't be read into all that much. It did not make him any more special, it simply was what it was. However, the insecurities that come with the complimentary side of a relaxed male attitude that was there to simply protect the physically more frail of the two of them, she hurt Adam and denied her purpose that God had intended for her: to please Adam in exchange for taking care of both of them. Back in those days it was fair to say God was new to the game of creation himself and probably made a mistake with her. He devised a plan to resolve this issue, as it was wholly unfair that one being be created for simply pleasing the other without the ability to understand the cost it came to the one protecting her. She couldn't understand because God did not make her correctly, and it wasn't her fault.

This marked the end of childhood for Adam and in order to have a sexual partner in the future, god had to remove one of adam's ribs in order to make a clone of Lilith. Think about things, there are XX and XY chromosomes that determine if you are male or female, do you think it is a coincidence that the male happens to be missing a piece of one of the "ribs" along the building blocks of life, in his DNA? As a price to both of them, they had to endure pain and hardship. God, being imperfect himself, had put his full self into creating what were supposed to be the two perfect beings, but things did not go as planned due to the nature of his giving the gift of free will to his children. The woman could not be satisfied like the man could, and so both of them had to die. Breaking Adam's DNA meant that he could no longer be sustained indefinitely by his physical body, it would mutate and eventually deteriorate until one day it would no longer be able to store what is known as the soul.

But God learned from his mistake and devised a plan. It would seem harsh to his children, especially the woman to be able to grant them eternal life again, but this was the only way to make it work. It was technically Lillith's fault that things did not work out, and God saw fit that woman should bear the pain of child birth, and in return know the kind of love only he can know for bring life into this world. It hurt like hell to do it, but it's what had to be done, just like the process of birth cannot be avoided. Adam and Eve had a job from then on, to teach their children right from wrong, to protect their family and establish communities when enough people began to exist that at least tried to maintain order. They were given the most basic laws he could think of that would keep humans together in love and be able to continue existing.

Originally there was no such thing as a soul, only the physical bodies. The soul came at the same time as Eve was created. "Life" is now purgatory, and your actions decide whether you will continue your existence on earth yet again to help keep humanity thriving and having a brighter future in which they can finally sustain themselves. Those who do good go to what is known as paradise or heaven. Their soul has grown from the positive life energy they have developed on their own and by connecting with others and performing good deeds. It is simply knowing God as a fact and being able to serve him with a higher purpose and be proud of what you have accomplished that allows you into "heaven". Once there, you can experience all there is to experience as a light being, be able to behold the splendor of the rest of God's creation, the thing he spent creating for us: the universe. If you are bad, corrupt, and evil at heart, you must bear the pain of mental insecurity and sometimes insanity to pay for your wrong doings, but that time spent is here on the earth, not in some underworld of brimstone and fire. Humans have the propensity to be the stuff of nightmares, and we are what we make stories about when we create tales of monsters and demons. The stories are ways for us to maintain hope for a brighter future, to try and be able to preserve a telling of what right from wrong is in a way that we can understand, a way that entertains us and captivates us. The stories are where the evil is meant to stay, it isn't meant to exist in the physical world, just in the mental. Until your essence or your soul learns finally what right from wrong is, and gains the ability to become intelligent and to plan things, to keep adapting and evolving, you are doomed to repeat your life again, only the next time you will be somebody else.

The lesson in that should speak for itself. When you hurt others, you are only hurting yourself. When you love others, you only bring good things back to yourself, and you are rewarded with positivity, and the growing of your soul. Once humanity finally reaches the point where it achieves immortality, you will be granted the choice to remain with God in non-corporeal existence and take over his job in watching over those with physical bodies once he finally is unable to continue living, or to get a physical body back again. Eventually everyone will have to become some sort of physical body again unless we become so advanced we figure out a way to maintain ourselves as light beings, because as a light being you are like a flame: you eventually wink out of existence when you become spread to thin. However, if everybody follows God's lead, and plays the roles he has set out for each of us, he can make it happen, he can make sure we all exist after He is gone, and we will then have the tools to make sure we don't disappear ourselves, lest the cosmos and exist without beings to inhabit and explore them. However, therein lies the genius. The way everything is set up, we are doomed to repeat ourselves in cycles until we get it eventually. The big bang was the explosion of God's awareness and self-realization and from there things begin to manifest themselves physically.

Eventually the universe would get too cluttered, thus the creation of black holes, infinitesimal singularities that act as garbage compactors for the cosmos. It allows information to be retained and spit out in other dimensions, infinite other dimensions. It allows for more and more big bangs to occur. Each start represents another attempt a life, it's only a matter of time. Not all stars and planets are destined to contain life, as that's just how things had to be, there had to be room for the process of creating. Thus, new stars are able to be born, new physical beings and elements too. And when it all gets too dense, as everything is designed in layers, it folds in on itself and explodes back outwards in a new dimension. In this way, there are now several dimensions in which light beings and physical beings exist and can continue existing, even after God is gone. Right now, He's still here, and he still steps in when things get too heavy, when things get out of hand. But how can we ever learn to be new Gods ourselves if we do not take responsibility and the lives of each other into our own hands 99% of the time? Truth is, if he stepped in all the time, if we weren't allowed to make mistakes and fumble around in the dark, we will never find out how to shine bright and create more light. Being in the dark is lonely, and God knows it all too well, and he doesn't want that for his children.

So, we all must do what is right until the day comes that we live up to our potential as human beings. God will judge you as you judge others, so that you learn how to be a fair judge yourself. If you are wicked, if you do not forgive others, if you do not forgive yourself, if you give in to hate and not accept love, then you are doomed to repeat life in a potential hell, away from God, being left to wonder if your life even has meaning or if you are doing all this for no reason it all. Less and less believe that he is real the smarter we get, and God knew this would happen, but he knew it would be just a phase. It was humanity's adolescent phase as a species. We have to know and learn for ourselves what is out there and what the extent of our own abilities are, and the more information we get, the clearer it becomes there was an intelligent creator behind it all that rarely steps in if at all, he prefers only to observe. Each time he is forced to act is the less time he has to exist, it drains his power, and he has to use it wisely, it can't be squandered. Each decision requires full planning, complete order of thought and master precision and skill in planning things out thoroughly, so as not to be too direct in his existence so that we simply give up and try and take advantage of what power he has left, because he can't afford for that to him, for everybody's sake. Keeping dominion newly formed dimensions that each have their own set of beings that will perhaps someday be able to realize their potential is highly taxing and does not come without cost. Eventually it will spread him too thin.

So, that is what I have come to understand about the world. What are everybody else's thought on this? To me, it all makes too much sense, and it does so for a reason.