NO MORE APPLES

A friend made a comment to me today about the tagline for our blog that revealed he'd completely misunderstood what The Sage meant when he made the offhand comment I've enshrined below the title.

"Adam ate an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It's a shame we ran out of apples."

What does that mean? Well, it's a reference to the fact that Adam and Eve, who were originally complete innocents, after succumbing to the temptation of the serpent and disobeying God by eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil recognized their nakedness and understood and acknowledged what is sin and what is righteous. There are so many people today who mistake evil for good and vice versa. They believe love is evil, violence is the proper response to insult or assault, selfishness is a virtue, great wealth is a sign of God's favor and poverty a disease of the lazy and ungodly, judgment is the prerogative of the powerful, and so on. They think torture is acceptable, the murder of innocents an unfortunate side effect of wars of vengeance, that further enriching the already wealthy is a noble goal even though it is done by cutting benefits to the poor and disabled, that might makes right, that some races are inferior and should be controlled by those superior. All of these sentiments are unBiblical, yet huge numbers of religious adhere to them.

The Sage's thinking was, since we're no longer innocents, it's a shame there aren't some of those apples available to open people's eyes to what is truly evil and what is truly good. I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were, there'd be fewer Rethuglicans and more progressives.