this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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Satan's biggest sin was giving humans free will. Let that sink in for a bit.
The reason he was cast out is because he tried to overthrow God by starting a rebellion.
And the serpent wasn't originally identified as Satan. He was called one in Revelations, but in Genesis it was just a cunning snake.
Regardless, humans couldn't have eaten the fruit without free will, so the serpent wasn't involved in them having it
Let's break this down further because the Garden of Eden is fucking weird.
So God has these two people he keeps as naked pets in a garden. He watches them every second of every day.
God tells these people "eat as much fruit as you want, but don't eat the fruit from that tree, or you'll die."
One day a snake tells Eve "God is lying to you, the fruit will make you smart; God wants you to be unquestioning and stupid."
So Eve eats, and realises she's part of some weird nudity cult where she was lied to and taught that the truth is dangerous.
She makes Adam eat and God, (who can see the future by the way) says "you failed my test, despite creating the conditions in which I knew would cause you to fail. Why couldn't you just have just accepted my lies and remained idiots? This is your fault"
Only atheists and fundamentalist Christians take the Bible literally.
We are sentient now (some more than others) but our ancestors were not sentient. There was nothing that was artificial before we were sentient and everything was nature. There was no good and evil, there was just finding food eating the food and surviving another day.
At some point humans became sentient. Aware there is more going on than just eating and pooping. If a monkey kills another monkey it's just doing what it has to do to survive. If a human kills another human, that's murder. There is no good and evil without sentience. There was no sin in the Garden of Eden before humans had knowledge. Being sentient means you're aware of evil, and you have free will. You don't have to follow God's will.
Maybe we'd be better off if we remained monkeys living in trees? All of the other lifeforms on the planet would certainly be better off if we had. There's a pretty good argument that humans becoming sentient wasn't a good thing to happen to the world.
But it is what it is, we are sentient. Can't change that. We can't go back to the Garden of Eden. After you've eaten something you shouldn't have, you can't undo it. Once you have knowledge, you can't just unknow things. Ignorance is bliss and knowledge can be a curse.
I can accept metaphorical truths, but I'd argue that any resemblance of them is coincidental.
There is so much redundant or unnecessary nonsense in the bible, that some of it is bound to line up with some fundamental truth farther down the path of knowledge.
Obviously, whoever wrote genesis was not aware of evolution, and I'm not implying that you are proposing this insinuation as an explanation (it's just an example of what I mean).
Regardless of being unable to un-knowledge ourselves, one of the things I was pointing at was the absurdity of free-will as a concept.
God is supposedly omniscient, he knows the test will fail.
If you want to get metaphorical on that, you could probably spin it in some pretty weird ways.
Regardless, Christians cannot reconcile the literal claim that God is all-knowing from the notion of free-will.
Satan didn't give humans free will, God did. They were created that way.
Um, you might want to double check that. The apple in the Garden of Eden is literally the free will metaphor expressed.
The fruit (not an apple) is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from it or they will die.
The serpent (who is not Satan, simply a snake) convinces Eve and subsequently Adam to eat the fruit, basically telling them that God is lying to them and keeping secrets from them.
God subsequently expels them from the Garden of Eden for disobeying him.
Adam and Eve had free will all along, it wasn't given to them by the forbidden fruit.