Dr. Dylan Johnson

So from this story's perspective, and it's not just this story, the two criteria for what is a god is number one, consciousness, sentience, knowledge, and the other is immortality.

And we humans get one of the two, but not both.

So we're not like the animals, we have sentience, but we're not like the gods either because we must die.

That's the story.

And that's the story.

So for, especially if you're part of the Catholic religious tradition, this has been the dominant interpretation of the garden story basically since the third century CE.

It's not invented, but it's heavily attributed to Augustine of Hippo.

So this is a major church father early in the history of

Christian thought, and his interpretation of the garden story is exactly this, that before eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, humanity was essentially guiltless, sinless,

And that by eating of the tree, we all, as descendants of the man and the woman whose name is revealed to be Eve, we all inherit this original sin.

So as we are brought into this world, we possess sin.

And this is why we have baptisms and there's various denominational disagreements on exactly whether baptism exists.

expunges that original sin, what the influence of Christianity and Jesus had to do with that original sin.

But this is the very Christian interpretation of that passage and really Catholic interpretation of it because you get disagreements in Eastern Orthodox tradition.

You get disagreements even among Luther.

Luther had major disagreements with Catholic church fathers about this.

And what I say is that's a legitimate interpretation of this text because ultimately there is punishment involved.

It's not devoid from the narrative.

But there's other elements that I want to talk about.

And I will mention that for a story that seems to be so focused on sin, the word sin doesn't actually appear anywhere.