Sunday In The Buckle Of The Bible Belt Thinking About Adam & Eve

It is the second Sunday of the new year, here in the Buckle of the Bible Belt, the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. I am almost 100% certain I am not going to church today.

Instead, I'm going to drop in on Gateway Park to check on some culprits and then head to the natural church sanctuary of the Tandy Hills to commune with a chilly Mother Nature.

Speaking of Mother Nature. I had a strange nightmare, last night, about Adam and Eve. We needn't get into the details of that nightmare, suffice to say, I was in it and none of us were wearing any clothes.

At some point in the nightmare I was startled in the Garden of Eden, which bore a striking resemblance to a Washington Rain Forest, by a talking snake.

That's when I woke up and laid there thinking about Adam and Eve.

Now, I will admit the amount of time I've spent being exposed to anything about Adam and Eve is bare minimalist. I know the basic story. God created Eve, then took one of Eve's ribs and made Adam. The freshly made couple was pure and without sin.

God told the pair not to eat anything from the Garden of Eden. I guess this was the first hint that this could be a bit of a capricious and cruel God.

The Devil in the form of a snake came along and tempted Eve with an apple. Adam implored Eve not to eat the apple. But in the first instance, in the history of humankind, of a woman not having the sense to listen to a man's admonitions, Eve took a bite of the apple.

This brought on the severe wrath of an incredibly hyper-sensitive God. Eve had committed humankind's first unpardonable sin. Clearly this new world God had created was going to be a place with some very strict rules.

Now that Eve had sinned, she felt shame. Somehow that led to history's first case of being ashamed of ones own body. Eve covered herself as best she could, with fig leaves and other flora. Adam did the same. I assume eventually the pair discovered, somehow, textiles or animal skins.

Once Eve and Adam became sinners, sex soon followed. I don't know if sex was in the cards had Eve not eaten the apple. And if she had not, and had sex not been invented, I do not know how the rest of humankind was to be produced.

I do not know which of Adam and Eve's sons came first, Cain or Abel. I do know that one of the boy's became humanities first murderer, killing his own brother. This was a very dysfunctional, sinful family. Not a great start for humanity, but I think we've done fairly well, overall, seeings we had such a rough start.

With only Adam and Eve and Cain or Abel being the only humans, I don't quite get where the next generation came from. Did Adam and Eve have some girls, thus giving Cain or Abel, sisters? Did the next generation come from some sort of what would now be a criminal assignation? Are we all the products of history's first case of incest? If that is not the case, who did Cain or Abel mate with?

Or, after God saw how easy it was to make Adam and Eve, did He start spewing out new humans at a factory rate of speed, so there was a large varied gene pool for Cain or Abel to mate with? If God was spewing out a lot of fresh humans, did Adam take on some wives in addition to Eve, as was the custom in ancient times?

If I read Genesis all the way through will these questions be answered?

Enough religion for this second Sunday of the new year. It's time for me to go to my special church.