Dr. Dylan Johnson

And he says, no, if you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely not die.

So the exact inversion of what he says.

And he's not wrong, but he's not exactly telling the whole truth, right?

So they're not immediately executed, which is actually at a linguistic level, I think kind of a play on words there because lots of laws in the Bible, we have really long lists of laws, things that you can't do.

And for quite a few of the punishments is the death penalty, you can imagine.

And that's what that line is.

You shall surely die.

That's the biblical death penalty.

And what the snake I think is saying is you won't die immediately.

Like you won't be executed if you eat this tree, which they're not.

But they will lose out on the chance to live forever.

And that's what that other tree is.

And that's where this theme of humanity's kind of existence is that we have knowledge, we have consciousness.

So we're not like the animals who are also in the garden.

but we're not like God or the gods.

And I use the plural there because at the very end of the Eden story, the reason we're cast out is not necessarily because we committed a sin, a word that doesn't actually appear in the story, but because we gained consciousness.

And by gaining consciousness, we have one of those two elements that define

Divinity, consciousness, knowledge, whatever that means.

That's a divine characteristic that we share as human beings.

What distinguishes us is that we die.