12 yr old son believes Adam and Eve got a raw deal

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My son feels that Adam and Eve got a raw deal. I read to him some very good responses from the thread “Did Adam and Evey get a raw deal?” (did-adam-eve-get-a-raw-deal/26696) on this forum but to no avail. He is stuck on Adam and Eve being very innocent like a toddler and how then unfair God was. My husband tried hard to impress upon him a scenario where a pre-teen child with a naughty older sibling of 18 brings in drugs to the house and the pre-teen child partakes willingly with his older siblings. The consequences of the older sibling will to be removed from the household and the pre-teen would loose many privileges and be grounded for an extended period.

Here is his entire question:
God didn’t give us free will, the devil did because the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the only reason why human beings know right from wrong. It is because of what the devil did in the garden that we have more responsibility than an animal does. So the devil gave us free will not God. God was acting like a huge control freak. God seems to be trigger happy with his punishments like when Moses did one bad thing and then Moses can’t go to the promised land. If you want to offer to God like Korah but if you are not a Levite then you get consumed by the ground. If God is perfect then why does he make mistakes; case in point the devil.

He does have high functioning autism and tends to have trouble with the abstract concepts of the Christian religion.

God Bless
 
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He’s 12, he’s on the spectrum and you already explained it to him.
I would let the subject drop at this point.
I would also limit his access to the internet so he’s not getting even more silly ideas.
 
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Someone was told me you will never win an argument with a child. I realize you are not arguing, but…
You can be thankful that he is thinking and curious about spiritual things. Blessings.
 
Happy2bcatholic1 said:
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Assertion: God didn’t give us free will, the devil did because the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the only reason why human beings know right from wrong.
Response: It is an incorrect assumption that humen beings did not know right from wrong. They received the command from God and knew it was a command before the fall.

Question: If God is perfect then why does he make mistakes; case in point the devil?
Answer: God gave free will for without it there would be no ability to love, love being given freely not something which is forced. Also God can bring good out of every situation as occurred with the fall of Adam and Eve then bringing the Incarnation.
 
The Church teaches that Adam and Eve had free will. That they were rational adults capable of making decisions. In fact, their will was even more free than ours, if you think about it, because God gifted them with total control over their passions. That is, those pulls we feel towards fleshly indulgences? Adam and Eve had wills with total mastery over that.

Yet in their pride they chose to disobey God anyway.

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil didn’t give them free will. It was their first experience of evil, giving them first hand knowledge of both. Ever heard the euphamism “to know a woman” or “to know a man” implying intimacy? Same deal. And for the first time, doing wrong, they felt shame. And God called them to repentance, but rather than repent they passed the blame.

“The woman YOU put in here with me made me do it.”

“The serpent tricked me.”
 
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Second that. He is at the age where the natural tendency is to separate from parents (and that means rejection of most anything that parents say or do, especially if the rejection seems to upset the parents), and where he is going to want peer approval. The internet brings a much wider ‘circle of peers’, and the most sought after these days are the ones who are ‘rational’, ‘skeptical’, ‘humane’, etc. Letting the argument go for now, so that he can’t enjoy arguing --and my gracious, at that age they don’t just ENJOY arguing, they thrive on it, prefer it, exalt in it, and live for it, and above all not so much limiting (you’ll be seen as a ‘control freak’) but redirecting his leisure to something he can focus on and keep more or less away from the electronics, will help. Perhaps something creative like sketching, where you can direct him to actual paintings, museum trips (not ‘on-line’), and where his needing to develop ‘your own drawing style’ would be an idea? Sometimes when people start to create things, and realize how much ‘work’ goes into them and how much legitimate pride they take and how much interest, he might start to think that God might have more love for Adam and Eve than he had thought God did?
 
Is it any consolation that at least he’s interested in Scripture?
 
I’m not going to comment on the specified issue here, as others have, but rather, give a perspective on the situation.

I think it’s awesome that your twelve year old son has this interest in scripture! Seriously, when I think back to when I was 12, I was far more interested in video games and sports than the Bible. Foster a love of scripture in him:)
 
Happy2bcatholic1 said:
Here is his entire question:
God didn’t give us free will, the devil did because the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the only reason why human beings know right from wrong. It is because of what the devil did in the garden that we have more responsibility than an animal does. So the devil gave us free will not God. God was acting like a huge control freak. God seems to be trigger happy with his punishments like when Moses did one bad thing and then Moses can’t go to the promised land. If you want to offer to God like Korah but if you are not a Levite then you get consumed by the ground. If God is perfect then why does he make mistakes; case in point the devil.

He does have high functioning autism and tends to have trouble with the abstract concepts of the Christian religion.

God Bless
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The premise is wrong from the get-go simply because the famous tree didn’t have the role your son assumes it did. Adam & Eve already knew the command, “Thou shall not eat…” , and this meant that morality, the Law, had already been implanted in their hearts. Gaining the knowledge of good and evil had nothing to do with a new conscience being formed, rather, that knowledge was a consequence of them breaking their consciences. Because what the tree signifies is that they would come to literally know, by experience, good and evil once they committed the first evil of disobedience of God. Their world would change IOW, radically, once sin was known beginning with their first sin which opened the door for all subsequent sins. As this moral evil flourishes in their brave new world, effectively autonomous from God now in the moral sphere, they would come to know its opposite: good, as well, the innate good of God’s creation, by contrast. The two were now identifiable where previously they were not because heretofore only good was experienced since everything in Gods creation was created good. And this understanding of the meaning of the tree squares with both Aquinas and the meaning of the Hebrew word for knowledge used there in Genesis as it usually implies a direct, intuitive knowledge such as to know a marital partner intimately in the carnal sense (a common usage of the word), or to know something by direct experience in any case.

When man decides to determine good and evil for himself by denying God’s determination of morality, one consequence is that good and evil will be known; man will firstly, immediately, experience the evil of his own decision, of his sin which opens the door for all subsequent sin. Because once man is spiritually and morally disassociated from God, morality becomes relative, man becomes his own God, and thereafter anything, any act, can and will eventually be considered as appropriate by someone and will be committed. Evil flourishes in the world as mans will alone reigns in it.
 
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I’d be careful limiting the internet. Go to far and it will look like christians are afraid of different perspectives. Limit the time, not the content. And if he’s on YouTube watching logicked, or armored skeptic, or tj kirk, or any other atheistic stuff don’t freak out on him. He’s looking for answers and with his condition, limiting what opinions he’s allowed to know of will only make him dig in his heels and resent you.

Unless he’s watching something obviously inappropriate, like isis beheadings on liveleak, it’s probably best to let him look for his own answers
 
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My son also has high-functioning autism, we have interesting conversations about religiosity too and he often comes up with some aspects of faith that I have not thought about, even if they are a bit suspicious. He also has a problem with ‘authority’ and has questioned the role of God in a similar light. Equally, I’m glad we have this discussions, even if they do become heated at times.
 
reply to wesrock: I think it’s significant that Adam and Eve had only one rule to follow, and they “blew it.” That rule had several levels of complexity. Superficially, it was to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the temptation of Satan was to disobey God, to ignore the rule – which is another, higher level implied rule. Their punishment, and ours, is for the sin of our first parents in ignoring or directly disobeying God.

At an intermediate level of this complexity: God gave the command to Adam, but it was Eve who first ate of the forbidden fruit. So, there is “step” in between the giving of the command and the commission of the sin – Eve did not obey Adam, or respect him, or however you want to call it. This was the first feminist movement in biblical history and it was a disaster.

The question here about this 12-year-old is one of invincible ignorance. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The genesis account CLEARLY implies that Adam and Eve had a free will, because they has a choice to not sin. The temptation by Satan is a separate matter. The story makes no sense, as this boy realizes, if they did not have free will – he simply has arrived at a couple bad conclusions.
 
Thank you! He doesn’t look at atheistic websites. I homeschool him but we don’t want to over shelter him. He gets some stuff from township soccer (public school friends) and he is just inquisitive, very very inquisitive!
 
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In the cool of the evening, God walked with Adam in the garden. Adam had the intelligence to have amiable discourse with the creator of the universe, to portray Adam as some ignorant toddler is a gross misinterpretation.
 
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Adam and Eve had free will and they were enlightened. They were our best chance. If they would have passed the test none of us would suffer with the temptations of the world, flesh and devil. We would have not passed the test either. We prove that with every sin we commit.

Adam’s sin was not disobedience but rather pride they thought they could be like God!
 
Happy2bcatholic1 said:
My son feels that Adam and Eve got a raw deal. I read to him some very good responses from the thread “Did Adam and Evey get a raw deal?” (did-adam-eve-get-a-raw-deal/26696) on this forum but to no avail. He is stuck on Adam and Eve being very innocent like a toddler and how then unfair God was. My husband tried hard to impress upon him a scenario where a pre-teen child with a naughty older sibling of 18 brings in drugs to the house and the pre-teen child partakes willingly with his older siblings. The consequences of the older sibling will to be removed from the household and the pre-teen would loose many privileges and be grounded for an extended period.

Here is his entire question:
God didn’t give us free will, the devil did because the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the only reason why human beings know right from wrong. It is because of what the devil did in the garden that we have more responsibility than an animal does. So the devil gave us free will not God. God was acting like a huge control freak. God seems to be trigger happy with his punishments like when Moses did one bad thing and then Moses can’t go to the promised land. If you want to offer to God like Korah but if you are not a Levite then you get consumed by the ground. If God is perfect then why does he make mistakes; case in point the devil.

He does have high functioning autism and tends to have trouble with the abstract concepts of the Christian religion.

God Bless
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You’ve got your hands full. Pray and if possible go to daily mass.
 
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Good questions! Here’s how I’d answer a 12-year-old who is asking those questions:
Happy2bcatholic1 said:
Here is his entire question:
God didn’t give us free will, the devil did because the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the only reason why human beings know right from wrong.
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“Free will” is a different thing than “knowledge of good and evil”, wouldn’t you say? I mean, after all, your free will isn’t what tells you what’s right and wrong – that’s your conscience!

So, God gave us free will, and He asks us to learn and develop our conscience properly, so that we can use our free will to make good decisions!
It is because of what the devil did in the garden that we have more responsibility than an animal does.
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Not really. We already had responsibility in the garden, and way more than animals did!

Before Adam ate the apple, here’s the responsibilities that God had already given him:
  • Cultivate the garden.
  • Care for the garden.
  • Eat from any tree in the garden except those two over there…
That’s a lot more responsibility than the animals had!

In a way, what that story tells us is that God gives us good gifts and asks us to respect the gifts and respect Him. When Adam & Eve disobeyed, He removed some of those gifts, but let them know that there was a path they could choose that would lead them back to Him!
So the devil gave us free will not God. God was acting like a huge control freak. God seems to be trigger happy with his punishments like when Moses did one bad thing and then Moses can’t go to the promised land. If you want to offer to God like Korah but if you are not a Levite then you get consumed by the ground. If God is perfect then why does he make mistakes; case in point the devil.
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OK… so, that’s your other thread, and I answered over there. 😉
 
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