While Christians diagnose a disease in the culture of unbelief called atheism, they miss the real dilemma at hand. Of course, this only encompasses one of the many ways their cosmology is almost correct. With their misconceptions of Hell, of course they're not straight on what is at stake in the universe and, furthermore, what is causing it.
Much more pressing than the issue of atheism and non-belief, is the error of post-modernism. At its root, post-modernism is a philosophy of literacy. The Grand Narratives of old were supposedly created and controlled by the existing powers, utilized to enforce social control through the lens of morality. The issue with this viewpoint is that, much like Christian Cosmology, it's almost correct. While the Grand Narratives were something utilized and, eventually, bastardized by the ruling class of the Dark Ages and prior, you have to look a little deeper at where the Grand Narratives originally came from.
In Moduli's model, there are four stages of human development: Unfolding, Strife, Prefrontality and the current stage of Metality. In the next few transmissions I will explore these individual phases.
Pre-consciousness, everything in the universe just reacted. Chemistry and Physics danced without witness or worry. It was a system with no outside. Stars formed of the cosmic dust and those stars erupted or collapsed. Elements were formed, physical structures emerging from these reactions. It would have been quite a spectacle to behold, but I'm glad nobody was there to witness it.
Life began to emerge in this dance, a strange brand of thing that could react and manage itself so that it would persist, either explicitly or through heritage. And it was good. If you want to see the Garden of Eden, look at Precambrian life. There was abundance and place for all things. Microorganisms didn't need nearly the resources that we need now in order to thrive.
I am of the mind that the Essential Manifold does not unfurl (or perhaps furl) in a perfect fashion. I think the first example of this was the evolution of the carnivore. With life eating life, you suddenly had dissonance in the system for the first time. Not that there weren't colliding systems that utterly destroyed one another throughout the cosmos, but, for the first time, you had a thing that would adjust itself to survive. And then you had one such thing that survived through the destruction of other things that wanted to survive. And thus, introduced a food chain and competition.
Shortly (in a grand historical sense), the Cambrian Explosion occurred. Life equipped itself with weapons (teeth, claws, poisons and pincers) and escapes (excretions, camouflage and evasive maneuvers). Hostility was now in full force, and with it, our first views of Evil.
In every sense, the notion of evil emerges from a hostile, competitive environment and without it, there is no Grand Narrative. So, the first ingredient for the Grand Narratives comes, actually, from the Unfolding.
It's probably worth noting, now, that Unfolding is certainly not the same as morality. Even among the evils emerging of the Cambrian Explosion, existence was merely doing what was designated in the Essential Manifold.
Even as humans emerged, they were unfolding exactly as they should. There was a time of great abundance when humans were first introduced in their most prototypical form. There was little more competition among them than anywhere else in the universe. Food was plentiful to the omnivore diet and the smaller numbers of humans.
While I don't think there was literally a Garden of Eden, I think the story is about an age of abundance and ignorance. These human bodies did not think about anything, least of all themselves.
But, this abundance wouldn't last when, like a virus, humanity spread over the surface of Blue Celestial, making foraging unsustainable. And thus, thinly veiled and scared, Adam and Eve were forced from the Garden of Eden.
21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
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.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the
ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on
the east side[e]
of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.