How the Eden Myth Works

Morality is synonymous and simultaneous with self-awareness. You can't be self-aware and unaware of moral choice. Moral choice, by definition, involves knowledge of right and wrong, good and evil. This is the reality of human consciousness. The story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge is simply a retrospective invention in the form of a fictional myth that encapsulates these facts. It's a diagram to explain morality. There isn't the slightest need to take the myth literally as those who wrote it would have well understood. Had you asked them if they had encountered our original parents in person they'd have laughed at you. The modern world believes itself to be very clever and sophisticated and is very ready to laugh at the primitivism of these writers. In fact, in literary terms, the modern world is stupid and literal (there is no better sign of stupidity than literalism). The modern world presumes, in its sophistication, to reject religion on the grounds that Adam and Eve didn't exist. This is just another example of the arrogance of a presentism that believes itself to be more sophisticated than the past. Of course they never existed. Truth does not need to have them exist in order to exist itself, nevertheless, in a purely literary vehicle.