INTRODUCTION
Imagine you are being offered a choice as to which kind of life you can live. The first choice is an immortal life. In living this life you naturally behave in a caring and respectful manner towards your fellow humans, happy and content, never knowingly causing another harm. As a consequence, there is no crime and no war in your world. You can even worship God, if you like. Sounds like a good life, doesn’t it?
However, imagine there is another choice being presented to you. This one is a mortal life where you periodically experience suffering, sometimes greatly so. The purpose of this suffering is to give you the strength of character necessary to be able to meet Almighty God, face to Face. In doing so, you will be gifted with the knowledge of all that is worth knowing.
Which life would you choose?
A choice of how to live is as important as life itself. However, according to the Bible, we’re not given a choice, we are literally “born in sin”. What would our world be like if we were instead given a choice and decided not to be born that way?
For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase “born in sin”, it’s a summary translation from the Bible and means that we humans are born sinners, that sin is inherited, and that we have no choice in the matter. With condemnation like that, no wonder many people are turned off religion.
In this book, I use logic to answer the above question. However, I use this logic with some religiosity. So, you will need to believe in God, and preferably have read the Bible, in order to understand this book.
In the process of answering that question, a number of conclusions were reached, some of which are: Being sinless does not guarantee immortality. Evil does not originate in us. We are not alone in the universe. We have lived past lives.
You might be asking why I chose to write this book, what inspired me to do it? It was dogs, specifically my working with dogs.
Subconsciously, I was looking for something that would explain the evil we live with every day in this world, why it seems so prevalent. I was yearning for something that did not hide evil behind the eyes. My daughter has a dog walking/daycare business and I found myself working with her after I retired. In the process of working with dogs, I noticed they displayed a certain kind of behaviour that I had not been cognizant of my entire life. It was innocent behaviour, no evil intent. It was refreshing to see.
I never fully appreciated the statement “A dog is man’s best friend” until I had a chance to work with them. They were always willing to accept love no matter what. They were overjoyed when their owners came to pick them up. When they did something wrong and you had to correct them, they always forgave you and never held a grudge. And when they wanted something, they were extremely polite about it. I couldn’t believe there were individuals in this world that could behave that way. Wouldn’t it be great if people were like that?
That’s when I decided I had to write about innocence, from a biblical perspective. What started out as a few pages became a book where I discovered truths about human nature that I wouldn’t have believed possible. And I used a wonderful tool called logic to do so.
Most people seem to have a good understanding of what it means to be logical. But what is logic, really? Most of us, when we think about logic, think of just one kind: deductive logic. Deductive logic is truth-based, one truth following from a previous truth, so that the veracity of the final conclusion cannot be denied. In this book, I will use deductive logic exclusively.
Sometimes in the logical process, it may not be obvious what the next step is. This is where intuition can play a role. You sense a hint of what the next step is, so you intuit it. This is the key to how I was able to get to where I have in this discourse: the reason for our existence on this planet. I also sense God’s Hand in this process, so I don’t credit myself entirely for any success I might have achieved.
In this book I will attempt to create a picture of a world inhabited by “Innocents”, as I have termed them. Innocents are individuals who chose not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as Adam and Eve did in the biblical Garden of Eden. Innocents are people without sin; they are incapable of evil thoughts. Moreover, Innocents can’t tell the difference between good and evil.
Some of you may be thinking that a world made up of Innocents would be just an expanded version of the Garden of Eden, a kind of paradise. But after reading this book you will see that the world of the Innocent is not a paradise in the classical sense. It still had accidents, natural disasters, and even disease. The only thing it didn’t have was human evil.
For those of you unfamiliar with the biblical story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, according to Judaism, they were the first people created by God. He placed them in the Garden of Eden to look after it and to populate the Earth. Among the trees in the Garden there were two of special note: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told Adam and Eve that they could eat the fruit of any tree in the Garden, including the Tree of Life, but they couldn’t have the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If they did that they would die. However, Adam and Eve were tricked into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by Satan (disguised as a talking snake), and as a consequence, had sinned, were no longer immortal, were cursed by God, and were removed from the Garden of Eden. They were left to wander a harsh and diminished world, to make a life for themselves and their children, eventually through the generations culminating in the world we see today, the world of the Guilty. This story is known as “The Fall of Man.”
The story of the Garden of Eden has been around for at least 3,000 years, and depending on which position you take regarding Adam and Eve’s immortality, the story presents a contradiction: If Adam and Eve were sinless and immortal, why was the Tree of Life, the tree that gives immortal life, with them in the Garden? It wasn’t needed, so why was it there?
There are those among you who believe that Adam and Eve were mortal while living in the Garden, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Here, I begin with the premise that Adam and Eve were immortal while living in the Garden, but through logic, I show that they had to have been mortal, but for reasons that may differ from your own.
This book is a record of the logical journey I have taken to address the implications that arose from solving the above biblical contradiction. At times I have backtracked, reiterated previous thoughts, and even reached interim conclusions that I later discarded. I’ve left those passages in to show that in thinking something through to its final conclusion, it is sometimes necessary to venture off the main path and travel down rabbit trails of logic to reach conclusions, before returning to the main path once more. Rest assured, it was all a necessary part of the logical process I had undertaken in arriving at the final conclusion: why we are all here.
In writing this book I discovered something about the two Trees in the Garden that I had not previously suspected: they play a central role in how one chooses to live. The one way is represented by the Tree of Life where one chooses an innocent, immortal life, a life that enables one to behave in a caring and respectful manner towards one’s fellow humans, happy and content, never knowingly causing another harm.
The other way of living, this one represented by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, brings a mortal life of guilt and suffering, sometimes great suffering, more than can be imagined. The sole purpose of this suffering is to enable us to build enough strength of character to finally be able to bask in the Magnificent but Terrible Glory of Almighty God. From this path, one emerges a suffering hero, gifted with the knowledge of all that is worth knowing, finally able and worthy to stand before Almighty God.
Indeed, these are paths that we choose every day, to be innocent or guilty in our behaviour towards our fellow humans, to choose to be influenced by our guilty past or to ignore it and behave as we deem fit. Of these two paths, it is the tough one, the one with the suffering that is the correct one. Stay on that path, and you will eventually meet your Maker.
This book will show you that there is no other way to stand with Almighty God except by choosing the path represented by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with its consequent guilt and suffering. We, here on this planet, are currently on the correct path to Almighty God. This is why we are here. Indeed, all of us are here because we believe in God, even those that claim not to.
I’ve said “Almighty God” a number of times above in order to make a distinction between “God”, the loving and benevolent god known to all that love Him, and “Almighty God”, the Magnificent God of Raw Power and Might that would shake us to the core if we went into His Presence unprepared. This is the god that Moses and the Jews met on Mount Sinai. And this is the god that we, on this planet, have decided we also want to meet.