You know me. I'm going to nitpick.

It's "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil". A significant point, since I'm not going to defend a literal interpretation of Genesis.

Jesus supposedly saved us from all sins. I'm not a fan of the original sin doctrine (if I understand it at all, which I doubt).

At this point, remember, Adam and Eve had no concept of good and evil, so they had no concept of what a lie was, and no concept of death.

And here are two interesting points I noticed: it is implied that God did not make the serpent, or at least that it didn't fall into the category of "wild animals". The other thing is, God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil."

"Like one of us"? I never noticed that before.

Given that Jesus spends half his time speaking in parable and metaphor, then explaining himself in plain language afterwards, this is nothing unusual. A figure of speech isn't a lie.

Interesting thread. It certainly serves as an exposition of your point of view, but obviously it should not be equated with how Christ would answer your questions no more than a "conversation" I write up between you and I could show that you think running Beta work is pointless. (Merely an example. Please, nobody get bent out of shape over this. I'd love to get beta work.)

If you want to talk specific issues with your examination, I take issue with your second question about "What sin..." As Didactylos pointed out, you may be talking the "original sin" doctrine. But remember, Christ didn't die for one sin, he died for all our sins. (For example, see I Peter 2:24) And no offense, but your case for the Serpent throwing things off is a red herring to me. The bottom line is eating said fruit has consequences, but the choice is yours. It doesn't matter if a serpent appears and convinces you to eat it, or if the fruit jumps off the tree and starts singing and dancing like concessions in a movie theater ad. The bottom line is whether or not you choose to eat the fruit. What if you worked a job handling cash. There would probably be some rule about not stuffing your pants with cash before going home. If a new coworker came along and questioned that rule saying the boss just doesn't want you to be rich like him, would that excuse you for taking cash?

And in your Lazarus story, you left out a key line which fits in between there. John 11:13 "Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that He was speaking of literal sleep." Why would he say sleep at first? I don't know, I'm not Jesus. But I think it was to show that he was calm and knew Lazarus would be healed. Even his disciples say so ("if he has fallen asleep he will recover"), although instead of taking those words as comfort, they use them as words of arguement. (How often do we do the same?) Again, like Didactylos says, Jesus has a history of speaking and people missing the point, and acting differently than others would expect. (eg Sleeping in the boat during a storm while others were in a frenzy.)

I think the search for information and truth is good. I don't think man should shut off the brain, especially when attending church or discussing theological matters. But there is a reason it's called faith. I don't think everyone will know every last detail. But there is a simplicity to Christianity that people have trouble grasping or accepting - myself included. It doesn't really matter if you take that fruit or if you take that money. What matters is how each person responds to Christ. Was he just somebody who wanted to be publicly executed, or did he really take our sins and sacrifice himself to be the Savior? And I believe you hit that one right on the head in your first question and answer.

Ok, now that we have the other stuff out of the way...let's talk about truth, logic, and original sin.

First of all, let me say that nobody can tell you for sure whether or not the concept of "original sin" is true. Why? Because nobody, aside from Jesus Christ, has ever lived a blameless life, and nobody ever will (see Rom 3:23). And even if somebody did that, in theory...we wouldn't even know about it until we got to heaven! As Col323 pointed out...the search for information is GREAT! We should not be turning our brain off whether we're talking about original sin, listening to a sermon at church, or any other activity. We just need to be careful not to make assumptions...and I believe that anybody who claims to know the true answer on the "original sin" debate has made some sort of assumption.

Now, I do not believe original sin is true...so maybe we agree on something here. Again, I'm not stating my opinion is fact...just saying what I think because:
* I believe the idea of "original sin" (as in we MUST sin because we have inherited a fallen status) was created by man to explain why we do the things we do instead of following God. This seems like a cop-out to me. It's basically saying that we're not responsible for what we do, because we can't help it, and that Jesus isn't paying for MY sins, he's paying for Adams.
* There's an inherent logical contradiction in the idea that humans were somehow "perfect" without this "sinful nature" before eating the fruit, but not after. If they were so "perfect", why did they eat the fruit in the first place? I don't think this makes sense.
* This also comes with the mentality (which you seemed to have above, Rick) that our sins are somehow God's fault because He didn't prevent us from doing them. IE, "if God knew we'd do X and He let it happen, doesn't that make it his fault?" I'll get to that one more in a bit.

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Let me propose to you an alternate hypothesis. Remember, it's great to study this stuff, but we will never know for sure, and can't say that we know for sure - it's impossible to prove something that happened back then. God didn't tell us everything, and the only way we would know is if He revealed the information to us. Anyway, here's some guesswork for you.

Let's start with why we were created. I think it's a good place to start because if we're going to make guesses about why God did (and allowed) the things He did, we should consider what he was trying to do. I believe we were created to be children of God, to love Him and fellowship with Him for all eternity - and He with us as the father. I believe that this is correct, and that there is a lot of evidence for it, so if you want to talk about that more later, Rick, we can.

Now, for love, you need free will. Again, this is another debate in and of itself ("do we really have free will if God has a plan and he can prevent/etc?"), but I believe that we truly do have free will. If we did not...how could we be held liable for our sins? The problem with free will is that it allows you to choose right OR wrong. To make the problem worse, when you look at the amount of decisions we make over a life time and the plethora of different choices and motivations - you come up with a slim to none chance of perfection, and slim left town. Since God is a just God, sin does not go unpunished. This creates a pretty big catch-22...but I kind of see it as unavoidable if you logically follow the consequences of creating beings to love and with free will.

Again, I do not think this surprised God one bit. What I am getting at is - something had to give. We are not incapable of choosing good - to say that would take away our guilt. Rather, we just sin anyway, and choose the path away from God. In the Jewish times before Jesus, God had commanded the Jews to perform sacrifices of animals every now and then as a temporary payment. But we needed something permanent, something worthy to pay for all of our sins, which is why our savior came into the picture, as was planned from the beginning.

Anyway, hope that helps. I'm not trying to post such a big wall of text, but you have brought up an extremely complex subject with an awful lot of guesswork involved...so as logical people, we should tread carefully. :-)

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So what does this all mean? In all practicality - it means nothing. It's all moot, and we can argue back and forth for as long as we want, and we won't be accomplishing anything meaningful in our lives.

Here's what really matters - YOU need a savior, just the same as I do. I don't know what's going on in your life, what kind of sins you have committed...but that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I have committed less sins than you or vice versa - neither of us are able to get to heaven on our own merits, regardless of how "good" we are in the world's eyes. God only asked one thing - for us to repent of our sins, and accept Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior. That's it.

We can debate and blame God for creating this fallen world all we want, but all that does is try to blame Him for choices that we make freely. Considering the catch-22 I described above, and the fact that God himself became flesh to pay for the sins that WE committed, I'd say he's pretty blameless. To repent, we need to confess that WE are guilty. Until we take personal responsibility for our actions, we can not possibly make a meaningful repentance.

My hope is that you allow God to do a work in your heart, brother - He desperately wants fellowship with you. There is no sin that is too great for His mercy. All you have to do is ask for it.

I really do like your ideas...Sliders on the Sci-Fi channel was one of my favorite shows back in the day. Anyway, you've managed again to bring up so many things in such a short response....I wish I was that good at being succinct. I think my head might explode! You are definitely spot on by saying that we are here for a reason. I mean, if we weren't...this mortal coil would be pretty useless, no?

I guess the biggest thing to remember here is that while many of us might have ideas on how we would run the universe...none of that actually effects reality. Our theories certainly aren't worth betting our immortal souls and eternity on - the only thing that matters is reality, and truth. Not knowing this fundamental truth was a huge hurdle for me before I came to know Jesus Christ. It is our tendency to pick and choose what we believe based upon what we want to believe, and is a natural bias that we must be very cautious of.

I have a friend whose mother decided to change her denomination from Catholic to Lutheran because she wanted to be divorced, and the local Lutheran church had no problems with divorce. She was not interested in what God had to say on the subject, she chose to believe what it was she wanted to hear. This happens in the Christian church, it happens in cults, and it is my belief this is why there are so many false religions today. Universalism even goes so far as to say that you can get a little truth here, and a little truth there, and just put it all together for a big, happy plate of whatever it is you want to believe.

So with that in mind, a few other things that were brought up was the seeming paradox of free will versus God's plan, works required of us, and the eternal punishment of hell...all in one paragraph. Yikes!

Free Will
The free will paradox is a toughie. Could it be possible to totally have free will? If God knows that we will reject Him, why did he create us? Why did he not warn us more? Even if we choose to do something, if He could have stopped it, does that mean that it's his fault too that X happened? Does that mean X was his plan in the first place? And, with all the above in mind...how is it that he would bring some to heaven, and condemn the others to the fires of Hell?

First, I'll throw out there that I believe that we do truly have free will. If we didn't, we wouldn't really be guilty of anything we did, like with the idea of original sin. So how does go along with God's plan? Like you said above - we ARE here for a reason. I believe that reason is to choose to love God, mainly due to what I stated in my previous post. If we rewind back to the beginning - this is God's reason for creating us, and this is his "general" plan. Of course, there are more specific plans He has, but I believe that if He forced every little detail on every little life...this would defeat the purpose of creating us in the first place. With that in mind...all of the rape, murder, wars, etc that He allows? As you said yourself...this lifetime is only but an instant in the face of eternity. No amount of lifetimes could make us worth of heaven, and yet He offers it to us by simply loving Him. Wow!

Works
I'll just throw this one out there - Eph 2:8-10
"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

We cannot get to heaven on our own merit - rather, God allows us there on the merits of Jesus, because he already paid the price for our sins. We can't exactly claim that we did anything by ourselves by accepting that grace - Jesus did it all.

Hell
While you only mentioned Hell in passing, I get the feeling that you do not like the idea of Hell, and maybe this is why you are looking at alternate possibilities, which why I'll talk about it a bit. One of the most common questions I have been asked over the years when telling people about God's love is, "Ryan, how is it you say that God loves us when He condemns people to an eternity in Hell?!". This is a very tough one for Christians to even answer for themselves, and I would say it's an especially fair question for someone who might not be a believer. I've heard many answers on the matter from different points of view, mostly along the lines of, "well, you're sinning against an infinite God, so you deserve infinite punishment".

As I'm sure you are aware, the general belief among Christians is that on Judgement day, some will go to Heaven to eternal paradise, and some will go to Hell to await eternal burning and torture. I was very surprised to find, however, is that there is not a whole lot of information on Hell itself. For sure, we are told that:
* There is only one way to heaven, and that is through Jesus Christ
* There will be a day when all are judged. Those not in the lamb's book of life WILL be cast into the fires of hell.

Throughout the bible, it is quite clear that the consequences of sin is hell. The problem is, if we step away from what we have been traditionally raised to believe and look at what the bible says, there are very few verses in the bible about what hell actually IS. So, while the traditional interpretation of eternal torment is prevalent, please know that others exist. One other is called annihilationism. I wouldn't typically recommend wikipedia for soul-searching, but this article actually sums up the belief pretty well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilationism

I'm not saying traditional doctrine is wrong and annihilation is right...because to be honest, I just don't know. Nobody can tell you for sure, and even if I could...I wouldn't, because it just doesn't matter. All we need to do is get to know God, follow his will for our lives, and seek real truth. I wrestled with the modern concept of Hell for many years, and it was a huge stumbling block for me. Don't let this become a stumbling block for you like I did.

Seek and ye shall find, knock, and it will be opened unto you.