The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Welcome to the first Monday School of November – STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense You Learned Yesterday” even when class is held the day before a national election!

Mark Twain, as you might well know, is generally acknowledged to be one of the best writers the United States has ever produced. What you might not know, however, is that Twain was a non-Christian who studied the Bible and spent a lot of time and energy attacking its many flaws. I’ve recently re-familiarized myself with the extent of these attacks by reading Allison Ensor’s Mark Twain and the Bible (University of Kentucky Press, 1969).

Today’s refresher course on the fatal flaw at the heart of the Bible’s idea of The Fall & Original Sin is taken from this book. While I would never want anyone to accept the following as true merely because it comes from Twain, I do hope his way of presenting this fatal flaw in works such as “That Day in Eden” and “Eve Speaks” might enlighten some for whom my own words on the subject have proven to be inadequate.

“‘That Day in Eden’ is supposed to have been written by Satan on the day of the fall. The opening part of the narration depicts the innocence of Adam and Eve in their original state and their bewilderment over the strange words in the prohibition which God had given them. Most of the passage consists of a dialogue between Satan and Eve, as the former tries to explain the words God had used. He finds the effort totally futile, for as he says, ‘Things which are outside our orbit – our own particular world – things which by our constitution and equipment we are unable to see, or feel, or otherwise experience - cannot be made comprehensible to us in words.‘” (P. 57)

“A second major Twain idea is introduced in Satan’s criticism of the moral sense. Twain had frequently heard preachers praise the wonderful gift of the moral sense, but he had Satan tell Eve that it is ‘a degradation, a disaster. Without it one cannot do wrong; with it, one can. Therefore it has but one office, only one – to teach how to do wrong… wrong cannot exist until the Moral Sense brings it into being.’ Twain would keep hammering this point home for the remainder of his life.” (P. 57)

“The action of ‘Eve Speaks’ follows closely upon that of ‘That Day in Eden’ and develops the same themes…. Eve begins with the insistence that she and Adam had done no harm and should not have been punished: ‘We could not know it was wrong to disobey the command, for the words were strange to us and we did not understand them…. We did not know right from wrong – how should we know? We could not, without the Moral Sense; it was not possible. If we had been given the Moral Sense first – ah, that would have been fairer, that would have been kinder; then we should be blamed if we disobeyed.’” (P. 57-58)

“The whole point of ‘That Day in Eden’ is that God was stupid to utter such a command [Gen. 2:16-17], for it was totally incomprehensible to Adam, and to Eve when he told her of it. Since it [as well as the threatened punishment called death] had no meaning for the pair, one could not reasonably expect that it would be obeyed. Further inferences, though not spelled out, are apparent: to punish the disobedience of Adam and Eve was unfair and unjust, and the greatest injustice of all was to punish mankind in general for that one uncomprehending act on that one day near the beginning of time. If the reader should protest that the story of Adam and Eve was not literally true, Twain could simply transfer the stupidity from God to the Bible. If God did not give the absurd command quoted, then it was absurd of the Bible to say that he did.” (P. 56)

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