Typically for our species, we try both to discern designs and to implement designs. From this source of impetus--so reflective of our Creator as a designer, and so deleterious to us ourselves as beings who rationalize transgressions--we create everything from worldviews to excuses for the least of ungodly behaviors. Nothing, tragically, so characterizes us humans as our twin tendencies to squirm away from the shame that ought ever to center us upon God, while also we turn away from what we ought most fundamentally to think and to do, placing ourselves in the service of the endless designs created by us--and which become our counterfeit "creators" in whose service we can commit the most heinous of acts.
This is the story of humanity. When "shame" rather than "guilt"--the universal "shame" aspect of our existences rather than the particularized "guilt" aspects of our actualizations--is the recognized point of emphasis, then Genesis makes sense. We--and everything else that is not God--are burdened with shame as surely as we are burdened with existence. This must be so.
God designed us to enter existence as we do. To say that God designed us to be created beings less than God is essentially a tautology--we cannot be the "created uncreated," and we cannot understand why God would create anything, but we can reckon that it is not ours to question the matter. We can reckon, however, that a God who created us with the capacity for shame has created us with the uncoerced opportunity to assimilate and make use of such an appreciation of our deficits.
Contrary to this is the theologians' mistaken consensus that "sin" is the source both of humanity's woes and humanity's shame. Rather than being designed as lesser beings in every regard (and granted therefore the chance at least to feel shame in concert with, and in proportion to, our limitations), the humanity of the theologians' conceits is the created-in-God's-image-as-moral-agents species whose original innocence abutted in perfect reflection the moral quality of God--a hideous blasphemy.
A creature that was always lesser than God in every way has at least the opportunity to feel ashamed against the perfection of God, but a creature that was comprehensibly "sinless" from the start was a godling, and a creature that ever imagines itself to be fallen from a perfection of God is indistinguishable from a demon. That we--all of our imperfections thrown into the bargain--were created to be lesser beings than God makes sense (so long as we are willing to believe that we have a Creator), while the notion that we were created as co-possessors of a divine and at-one-time pristine "image" of God as a moral agent is fantastic self-delusion.
Inherent in this "fantastic self-delusion" is a design on our part of a latter twin of our original creation (and of our original Creator.) There is at first the imagined God who creates humanity as sinless, followed by a seen-only-after-the-fact God who is pained to see Adam fall into the trap that this inserted-into-the-story God knew from the start would ensnare the man. This latter "God" is a creation of humanity's design, and this former version of God (the true and original Creator) has been wrought by humanity's conceits into a background figure. We begin, with our delusion of original sinlessness followed by delusion-upon-delusion about sin as we define it, to layer over our receding appreciation of an ineffable Creator first one, and then another, and then another design of God as we choose to see him. As I quoted myself above,
Nothing, tragically, so characterizes us humans as our twin tendencies to squirm away from the shame that ought ever to center us upon God, while also we turn away from what we ought most fundamentally to think and to do, placing ourselves in the service of the endless designs created by us--and which become our counterfeit "creators" in whose service we can commit the most heinous of acts.
The tragedy of Genesis is not foremost a tragedy of sin, but a tragedy of design practiced by humanity. Or call it a tragedy of conceit. Or call it--if the language serves best--a tragedy of the sin (for the man is never understood in Genesis to be sinless) actualized in humanity attempting to recapitulate the creation process--the conjuring from the recesses of humanity's murky selves satisfying designs of the world we conceptualize around us.
In reality, the shame of limitation spawns the shameful creation on our part of inherently limited conceptions of reality--or what we like to think of as reality. Indeed, the very act of conceptualizing something--gathering the available parts of what we have decided is "something" into an analyzable and communicable conceit--is inherently limiting. That is what we do, and that is what Adam did, and I am not forgetting that I presented the promise that the inchoate "shame" precincts of the Genesis story would make more sense when examined than would the silly sin-story we have made of the Forbidden Fruit--a story that is imagined ridiculously by the theologians to mark the alienation of the created from the Creator, when inescapably the created-Creator term is the embodiment of alienation itself.
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