There are many who would agree with the sentiment “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.” While charlatans have always abounded in the “spiritual realm,” the whole idea of ghosts continues to capture the imagination. For my part, I believe I live with ghosts, living with the dead if you will, but there is no fear in this for me though I do not know if one of my departed loves ones should suddenly appear whether I would have a heart attack or not. If my departed loved ones and friends remain with me as though they had simply put off their mortal bodies well and good. I take what comfort I can from believing this. People are “spiritual” beings no matter how many attempts are made to describe us otherwise.

One of the questions that seem to demand an answer of me is whether ghosts are the natural state of humans after death, whether Adam and Eve were a part of the spiritual realm in their creation and through The Fall became “unnatural” as physical beings subject to disease, death, and decay, but after death we return to the natural, spiritual state from which we came.

But being spiritual at our very core, our very life essence, humans cannot be faulted for looking for answers that defy any scientific attempts to find answers to spiritual questions. However, among the “natural laws” is one that impels people to call out, especially in distress, to a higher power. “God help me!” is probably among the most common of utterances among human beings; it is the thing that gives credence to the dictum “there are no atheists in foxholes.” But because it cannot be put under a microscope or shaken in a test tube, this natural law is denied by those that believe they are “too scientific” to subscribe to this law; that is until they find themselves in extremis.

This natural law of crying out to God has nothing to do with various religious rites and liturgies. Much like Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” I talk to God, but I do not believe in prayer; that is I do not believe in asking some higher power to act on my behalf. My position is one that if God hears the screams of suffering children being tortured and murdered by monsters in human guise and does nothing to intervene on the behalf of these children, I can hardly expect him to hear and respond to my requests. While logic demands a reason for humans responding to the natural law of calling out to a higher power, even the common belief in an afterlife, logic also rejects this higher power responding to what amounts to religious nonsense. What I do believe is humans are the result of an act of Creation, and it is what came to be called the “divine spark of life within us” that responds to this natural law just as children call out to their parents.

While it would seem to be the Devil’s agenda to “educate God out of people,” especially in our schools and universities, such efforts are doomed to fail since in order to do so human nature itself including the natural law mentioned would have to be changed. And not all the laws by all the atheists in the world will ever succeed in doing this. Soon enough I’ll know the facts of the case, if they are to be known at all. What I have is hope of a hereafter, and one in which as the Bible has it “all tears will be wiped away.” But this is my hope; not a certainty; though in some inexplicable way I believe “in my bones” that my hope will be fulfilled no matter the lack of proving it to myself or any other.

In the meantime, the reality of Good vs. Evil has been the struggle of humankind from the very beginning. And it is in attempting to make sense of this human condition in which evil seems always to have the upper hand that I’m compelled to try to make sense of this. And while much has come down to us from antiquity concerning this struggle, the Bible remains the best source of collected writings on the subject.

But as with other Scriptures from various sources, the Bible bears the imprint of many imperfections and contradictions. Still, as a matter of scholarship it stands far above any other writings having to do with the origin of our universe and life, of the relationship between humankind and Creation. However, there is a thread running through all such writings and mythologies having to do with sin, something that accounts for alienation between a Creator, or Creators and humankind, something that makes our history as a species one of Good vs. Evil throughout. The doctrine of “Original Sin” is an attempt to make sense of this alienation; keeping in mind the myths of antiquity often have their origins in facts of some kind. The task of scholars is to discover these facts.

In the beginning it reads in Genesis that God made creatures male and female, and there is no evidence for how they “evolved” into male and female. Men and women have left no evolutionary trail to how they became male and female. And no matter what amounts to smoke and mirrors on the part of devout evolutionists they can obfuscate but they cannot explain this failure in their theories. While few would dispute change takes place over time, that many life forms change and adapt or die, the honest person must allow there are gaps in evolutionary theories that cannot be closed by an entirely mechanistic theory of the universe and life. And while I decry those whose “faith” demands an entirely mechanistic view of the universe and life, neither do I subscribe to religion as an attempt to avoid the hard facts of science and rational thought processes.

Knowing the millions of years hominids (a term somewhat indistinct) have been around without giving rise to civilization led me to hypothesize something happened in a comparative instant of time to change this culminating in Modern Man a mere 11,500 years ago. The consensus seems to be climate change at that time made it possible for humans to engage in agriculture rather than being hunter-gatherers, and the agrarian society providing an assured food source became organized on a level not possible in time past. But this alone does not entirely satisfy the question of how such a thing became possible to the very creatures that had been around for many thousands of years previous to this sudden historical event, one that would shape cultures resulting in the artists, inventors, and scientists that produced the kind of world we live in today.

We do know that writing was a key element in the rise of civilized societies, a means of communicating the knowledge of one generation to those following not possible by oral and pictorial communication alone. It would be the refining of writing together with a numbering system that meant so much to the most successful of early cultures. But throughout those earliest cultures from the most primitive to the most advanced there was the continuing struggle to make sense of the questions of life and death. In the more advanced cultures the earliest mythologies became organized around philosophical speculation giving rise to flourishing arts and sciences, while those remaining primitive continued in the comparative ignorant darkness of superstitions.

But even the most advanced civilizations continued to rely on the mythologies of the past in attempts to answer questions of our origin, of life and death not possible to scientific inquiry and discovery. And even today we have no scientific understanding of life and death, and only theories concerning life and its origin.

The opening chapters of Genesis have long held a particular fascination for me, largely because I believe they present the story of Creation from actual events; but for the most part the story is a riddle at best defying attempts to get at whatever the facts of the events were. At the worst, the story is mishmash and contradictory, making little sense in places. For example, from the use of the plural “gods” in making the decision to make the Adam in their image, I conclude there was a council of the gods involved with this decision. The book of Job, thought to be the oldest of the books of the Bible, seems to infer there is such a group of gods. And there is the matter of the story in Genesis involving the sons of God and the daughters of men inferring groups belonging to both though we do not know the facts leading to the story or what actually distinguished between the two groups beyond what is written. Chapter eleven of Genesis is the last place an apparent council of the gods is mentioned in the decision to disperse humankind by the “confusion of tongues.” From there on throughout the rest of the Bible male dominance of the singular Deity is used.

Of the several assumptions one might make about the story of the creation of Adam and Eve, as well as much of the Bible, is a clear prejudice on the part of the writer against women. And if so, it was a prejudice that has been in evidence since the earliest of recorded history; but if not such prejudice on the part of the writer then what? Why should Eve be made to appear more susceptible to being beguiled by the Serpent than Adam? Of course, Adam appears a weakling when he blames both God and Eve for his own failure. But God’s curse against Adam is predicated on his listening to his wife! It’s as though God was condemning Adam for listening to a woman and thereby being less than what God expected of a real man! But why didn’t God take vehement exception to Adam’s including the Deity in his excuse “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me…”?

There is some obfuscation in the story. Adam and Eve were created by the gods, but the Lord from whom Adam and Eve tried to conceal themselves is given as a lone entity. Yet when discovered to have eaten of the forbidden fruit, the narrative reverts back to the plural in “the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” This returns to the singular Lord God in driving the man, singular, out of the Garden, though the inference is clear that both Adam and Eve were expelled.

Another curiosity presents itself in that it would seem Adam and Eve did not have sex until they were driven out of the Garden. This at least implies that sex as we know it did not occur while Adam and Eve lived in the Garden; that whatever happened through their innocence lost by their disobedience to God made them aware of their nakedness, an implied change in their physical condition and they tried to cover themselves. What they were before this change we do not know, but the change wrought in them by God’s judgment upon them resulted in the physical bodies we are born into subject to disease, death, and decay. The Bible has it that sin entered the world by Adam’s transgression, and the penalty of sin is death; but what of Eve?

I Timothy 2:11-15: Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.

The Apostle Paul often seems to characterize women as subordinate to men, and this is in keeping with Jewish theology. But his word to Timothy concerning the salvation of women emphasizes that particular part of the curse in the Garden falling peculiarly upon Eve quite distinct from Adam; that women were to suffer in a way quite distinct from men. And from this the concept of Original Sin being the act of sex with women considered “unclean” and continuing to tempt men has been a part of religious doctrine in many instances.

In Genesis, Eve is presented as more susceptible than Adam to being gulled by the Serpent. Is the written account due to a prejudice against women on the part of the writer? Or was there a distinction in the creation of Eve that made her rather than Adam the target of the Serpent, and in her failure to obey God was made to suffer disproportionately from Adam? Many attempts have been made in both philosophy and theology to discover why women have a role so very distinct from men, and why they continue to suffer from male domination and being thought of less value than men.

I have always been willing to accept that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” but what exactly that glory consists of, well, apart from us mere mortals trying to follow the Golden Rule I’m not at all sure.

For whatever reason, primarily climatic changes, life on our planet has gone through many cycles over millions of years. Then suddenly in a mere moment of time some 11,500 years ago Modern Man with civilization burst upon the scene. Many credit a change in climate conducive to agriculture for this sudden emergence, but believers may be excused for taking the Genesis account seriously in this respect. For my part, I do credit the Genesis story while at the same time knowing it is a mishmash and contradictory in places.

For example, if God made them male and female from the beginning, what went wrong that made sex a curse equated with original sin and why did the curse fall primarily on Eve? Taking the story of Creation in Genesis literally as written it is as I said a mishmash and contradictory, making no sense in several ways. Since the story was recounted through generations before it found its way into the account we have in the Bible it remains only conjecture and speculation. My own is based on years of theological studies and reading tomes of Biblical criticism by the finest minds in the discipline; and after so many years of such studies not finding any satisfactory answers to the particular questions concerning the events of the Garden and The Fall.

But the obvious emphasis of the story of The Fall is on innocence lost, since the Serpent did tell a partial truth in that once eaten the forbidden fruit opened the eyes of Adam and Eve and they became as gods knowing both good and evil, a point emphasized in Greek mythology which may have made its contribution to the account in Genesis.

Well, I don’t have any answers to my questions concerning ghosts, and I don’t have any answers concerning The Fall and Original Sin. But being a spiritual being, I’m compelled to continue speculating and turning the questions over and over in my mind, taking what comfort I can in knowing many others struggle with the very same questions.