The original belief that I learned was that God created perfect humans, humans disobeyed God by eating from the tree of knowledge which was the first sin by humans, God punished them with death which in turn would be passed along to all humans since they were the offspring of the first man and woman, and Jesus' sacrifice payed for that sin as a ransom which gave humans the chance to return to that original perfect state of being.
The story sounded so believable when I was an avid jw. But since I left and those blinders came off, I went back and analyzed the story. And immediately I found some discrepancies.
Along with the tree of knowledge was another tree, the tree of life. (Gen 2:9) When Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge, they gained the ability to know good and evil. So apparently they did not have this ability yet. God then stated in Gen 3:22: And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." According to this verse, they did not have the ability to live forever either, and were cut off from the chance to gain that ability. What is so signifigant about this?
Rom. 5:12: Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned--" This says that death came through sin, meaning that humans would not have died until they had sinned. But if this is the case, why would God have created a tree of life? Why would God drive humans away from it and place guards there to protect it? Since humans did not have the ability to live forever unless they had eaten from the tree of life, it seems reasonable to think that they would have died at some point in their lives. So it is pretty obvious that this is a major contradiction.
This also brings into question why Jesus would have been needed in the first place. Without access to the tree of life, it would not have mattered. Since this is the main theme of the entire bible, I find it very curious how such an error was overlooked by anyone professing to be christian.
I'm sure an argument would be raised about whether or not the good people make it to heaven while bad people go to hell. Well, considering that God created both magical trees and humans to reside on the earth, and placed them so close together, it would seem logical that God's intent was for humans to live on earth, not on other planes of existence.
Were the trees symbolic? If that is true, it only creates more problems then if they were literal. No literal trees would mean that sin and death are only symbolic as well, the garden of Eden was not real, and neither were Adam and Eve. And that would be fine except then you need to explain why it was necessary for Jesus to die as a ransom sacrifice. And to suggest that Jesus was only symbolic to a Christian would send them into a frenzy.
It is a discrepancy like this that makes it hard to take the bible as anything other than folklore. If God had created humans as perfect beings, why the need for magical trees to add knowledge of good and bad and the ability to live forever? Not to mention a talking snake and a spinning sword (swords did not exist yet), and humans blamed for failing to recognize the difference between good and bad BEFORE they even had that ability. The need for Jesus to free humans from the penalty of death and yet, humans never had the ability to live forever to begin with.
