The Garden of Eden

At Sunday School I was taught how the Israelites won battles and prospered because they worshiped God. Then in senior school I learned that in the trenches of WW1 the Germans raised a board which said, "Gott mit uns" (God is with Us) and the Brits replied with a board saying "So have we" (Got mittens.) Both believing God was on their side made me wonder if there was more to the Bible than worshiping; if it had more in it than was obvious.
Let us suppose that Adam was not the first Homo Sapien but was the first one to look around and recognise beauty and realise there was more to living than picking berries and taking a spear to a boar. Even suppose Adam was not one man but many around the world; in fact humanity. This realisation would be a giant leap in understanding, a huge leap in evolution, and would explain the 'other men' in Genesis.
Naturally Adam would talk it over in his grunts and whistles with Eve, stuck in the cave, cooking and washing.
With his new appreciation of things, Adam becomes absorbed in boar and buffalo and how they move around and their general habits but starts to complain about Eve's cooking - do we always have to have spinach with boar?
This irritates Eve and she too looks around, notices the apples and introduces apple sauce to their diet.
Instead of just a story,
we have a view of family life, not just in prehistory but in many present-day households, Adam might be the Might Hunter but it is Eve who is making the family decisions.
Both Adam and Eve are becoming curious and curious people are never content, their legacy to mankind is to be ever seeking the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
There is no location of the Garden of Eden, it is a state of mind called contentment where people are neither curious nor seeking new experiences.
This leads to a view of the Bible as a teaching document with broader scope than pure theology - for example, where did the idea that we need a holiday come from?

Heroes are human

When it gets to Kings, the story of the Israelites is the story of a whole nation, or a major corporation and we can see all the politics of multi nation companies at work. Nevertheless, let’s look at David. David is a hero king yet he is humble; his real concern is for the wellbeing of the nation. The nation is bigger than David, not the other way round as some politicians come to imagine. Yet the story tells of David lusting after another man’s wife, not only lusting but engineering the man’s death so that he can have her for himself. If this is true, why not just ignore it and keep the hero king’s moral reputation clean? Because it shows David as a human being. We have so many heroes from history who have no faults or defects, Arthur, Robert Bruce, yet David is not one of them. This is one of the non- religious lessons the Bible teaches – honour people for what they do, but remember they are humans and have human motivations: Robert Burns poetry is a gift to the world and should not be tainted with his human failings; Turner’s landscapes are magnificent and his treatment of women should not detract from that. The wonder of it is that humans could create such things and that should be a motivation for each of us to try.

Saul's statue

As predicted, in the end Saul took advantage of the people. He was king for forty years and, not surprisingly started to think he was something special, even having monuments erected to himself. He'd become so set in his ways he became a danger to the community and unable to use Jonathan and his new tactics. It’s the same in many spheres of human activity, business, management, clubs and teams; leave someone in the same position and they feel they are indispensable or that no one can, or will, take their place. It assumes that if they drop dead the activity will collapse. It also means they start to enforce their opinions on the organisation and, often, in business hang on to outdated ideas and systems because they introduced them or they are comfortable with them. Several organisations insist on moving senior people every three years. What can one achieve in three years? Motivation and reinforcing goals and culture. But not long enough to change and upset the entire organisation nor long enough to become a statue. For the team, the new person has no preconceived ideas about products, tools or tactics. No one has a chance to set up an ivory tower or an empire and the organisation stays lean and mean. In a club, without intent, things get swept under the carpet if one of the officers is too long in one post. One misconception is that a club will die if the chairman or secretary gives up. If the remaining members are not motivated enough to keep it going, why does it exist anyway? The nation didn’t exist because Saul was there, Saul was there because the nation existed.