1 It's allegorical, not literal. The fruit, the serpent, the garden, are not necessarily literal. Fruit=Sex? Snake--maybe not a real snake, maybe equals just some evil presence, or concept of spiritual/mental temptation? Don't know. Not really meant to know. Had the author wanted us to know, he would have been doing all the writing and thread-tying-up you did to point out that there was some other meaning in the Garden tale than the obvious ones the LDS interpretations have traditionally come up with.
2 Was the whole point about rebellion? Or was it really about mankind taking upon itself the burden of Free Agency, of actually exercising a choice--specifically one in defiance of God, one that would prove the concept of Agency itself? In your thesis, not defying God proves the Agency of Man just as much as disobedience to God. Talk about fallacious logic. Man only has Agency THEORETICALLY, as a concept, until he exercises it in a way particularly of his own will--IE Free Will is only Free Will if it's free to disobey God, and until that happens once, Free Will is only a concept, not a reality.
Otherwise, what you've done here is fall back into a Calvinist/Papist, well, "orthodox" Christian interpretation of our First Father and Mother being inexcusable sinners, because it somehow annoys you not to be able to say that any and all disobedience is inexcusable, because somehow that would cheapen your personal perspective of "sin" and Free Agency or something.
3 There's nothing confusing about the two commandments in question, one to reproduce, and the other not to eat of the mystical, metaphorical fruit of knowledge. It's the latter that is unique if anything, not the former.
What knowledge is gained by not eating the fruit? Nothing. It's the knowledge that nothing has changed and nothing is going to change forever. Man in this state of "enlightenment," (non-"enlightenment that is) only has a theoretical power to manipulate his environment and change the world around him, to act, and be acted upon. Even the changes he effects in this state are just the will of God being executed by a compliant servant who has no choice. Unless Man eats of the fruit--disobeys God, the fruit of disobedience we might say--he exists only as an aspect of the willful expression of God, not as a co-eternal intelligence and unique personage. (One of the first heresy's Joseph Smith pointed out "orthodox" Christianity had perpetrated upon the Church.)
Every father comes to the point where he says, OK, you're a big boy now, it's up to you, but I'm telling you not to go off into the big city, don't play with dynamite, don't speed and don't stay out late. Those are my rules or you're going to get killed. No father says, hey, it'll work out great, take my hot rod, have some liquor and a few guns, go climb some loose rock faces, get in some cliff diving, find a good brothel, maybe join the army, go off to war and you'll be fine. Fathers are protective. So, Heavenly Father gave Adam and Eve a very specific commandment with a very specific sanction against disobedience: It's your choice, but you'll pay for it. Not: you'll burn in hell, but you'll bring yourself and your world down to a mortal level. If that happens, I can't help you any more. You're dead to me.
God cannot create a mortal world and mortal children and be happy with that. God is not about consorting with imperfection. He can't even hang around that. You do that thing I warned you about kids, and you're outa' here. My house, my rules. But you decide how it's gonna be.
Mankind had to chose mortality. That was the start of Agency. That was the birth of "knowledge," but more importantly, that was the only path to true wisdom and enlightenment. To suggest hanging around with God for eternity in the garden would have been just as good, is essentially Satan's plan. There was and never could be any other plan of salvation than the plan of salvation. Mankind needed to make real choices with real consequences in a real environment they had dominion over, to suffer, bleed and die for their own actions and ideas. That is the only way to understand the bitter and the sweet. That is "learning." Not an eternal garden party with Dad. We had that already in pre-mortal life.
But let me put it this way: We know there was a council in Heaven as we call it. We know there were plans submitted. The one chosen, the one Elohim accepted from Jaweh, Jehovah, we now call the "Plan of Salvation" and have based a religion upon it. We know Lucifer's plan was rejected. We are unaware of any other options offered, like Adam and Eve remaining sinless for eternity in the Garden of Eden. In case you're still missing it: Jesus Christ was scheduled to come redeem us from the inevitable fall of Adam and Eve long before there was a Garden of Eden for them to be driven out of. If you argue with me on this point you are by definition a heretic. Or at least not LDS.
4 By way of exploring or perhaps more so, countering your logic, (and in this case I actually think it has merit) what if the lesson of Abraham offering up Isaac as a sacrifice, is really supposed to be that Abraham made the wrong choice. What if the thing he should have done is told the Lord to stuff it up his divine nose, proclaim that human sacrifice was evil, and no true God would ever demand that of a faithful servant. Because, if that's not the case, then you're arguing that God is arbitrary, and whatever God says is just and true, even if it defies every other edict ordered by, and conception you know of the Supreme Being. You can't get any more Ex Nihilo/NeoPlatanist than that. Not LDS thinking at all.
If God told you to kill one of your children, would you just bow down and do it? Or would you question the source of this "God" you're taking these suddenly bizarre orders from? Would you, as Abraham did, escape the degenerate culture of heathen barbarians, only to blindly concede to participate in the same inhuman slaughter of the innocent, and not wonder what the point of continuing to follow this allegedly morally superior "One God" is then?
The question you do not even comprehend, that you've never thought to ask yourself even, is whether or not there is indeed a universal code of just, true, eternal principles that exist independent of, and superior to God, laws God himself cannot even break or he would cease to be God, or if the lesson you're supposed to be learning in life is to mindlessly conform, to follow a strict obedience to God's command even when it seems to be overtly contradicting that which you know to be eternal law? Or, is doing God's alleged will, even if it strikes you as blatantly evil, the ultimate test of "faith," thus forgiving you for abandoning any higher principles it ostensibly violates?
If so, then you are a prime target to be a puppet of Satan. And that is the real paradox of LDS theology.
5 Specifically: Is "faith," and "obedience," indeed the fundamental, primary lesson of mortal existence? Or is mortality literally a training for godhood, and laboratory for making independent, godlike judgments based upon a personal understanding and commitment to eternal principles--principles you have so incorporated yourself with and invested into, that you would cease to be you if you violated them?
I submit that contending Adam and Eve could have fulfilled the plan of salvation without ever disobeying God in any way, is doctrinally ludicrous relative to 4 standard works of canon and thousands upon thousands of pages of correlated, authorized, official LDS teaching materials stretching back for well over a century and a half. Well over. Under that scheme, there is no need for a plan of salvation laid out from the beginning of the Creation. No plan of salvation by definition exists, nor can one exist, if it includes Adam and Eve not falling.
You seem to have missed that.
You're essentially saying Adam and Eve would have been saved by their works--or at least lack of bad works. (Since by conventional standards, they were already "saved.") But then again, LDS theology has quite a different notion of salvation, and the ultimate reward of the Celestial Kingdom is not usually conceived as running around naked in the woods playing with the animals for eternity. And frankly, I can't follow how you've hypothesized some alternative reproduction of billions of offspring that don't age or die and never suffer or disobey.
Adam and Eve fell, they disobeyed, they were penalized. So what? That's the point of mortality is it not? And would not any one of their hypothetically perfect, sinless Garden of Eden offspring eventually have made the same choice, gobble some fruit, and set the plan in motion anyway? If it bothers you that much to suggest that our First Parents "got away" with being naughty somehow with a wink and a nod from their Creator...don't think about it.
What's really warping your mind is having to concede intellectually that absolute obedience to every whim of the Almighty might not be what it's all about all the time. That's a very Wesleyan perspective. Not terribly LDS. I take that back, but we have Emma Smith to blame for that.
Think about this: by definition sin is disobedience to God's will. But is that really precise enough? God forbade the fruit, but was it really against his will? If he can test Abraham with an unrighteous commandment--in other words, he ordered Abraham to do something blatantly unrighteous that he never intended Abraham to do--why is the Almighty in your mind then limited to not giving ostensibly contradictory commandments, and having mankind choose the greater of the two in the conflict as a similar test of mental and spiritual character? As Abraham chose obedience in his case, as opposed to refusing to perform what he surely knew to be an evil practice, Eve, and then Adam, chose to accept the given penalty for breaking a lesser commandment, in order to fulfill the entire purpose of mankind's existence.
Not a bad choice, however you want to characterize it. But it was a CHOICE . It was THEIR choice. And for generations LDS scholars, prophets, and authorized CES instructors have been saying it was the RIGHT choice. Live with it. Wrap your head around it. Embrace it. It's not going anywhere.
I know many of you are freaking out at the notion of "situational ethics" figuring into LDS theology, but there you have it. Did our Father not, as clearly canon says, defer his will to Adam and Eve on the issue of mankind's own enlightenment and progression? Why is this a difficult concept?
So, argue what you will about paradoxical commandments or the significance thereof. Jesus is not Christ, or even born in "Sinless Garden" scenario. There is no "mid time" for the Savior in which to come and fulfill his mission if time stands still in the garden. There is no end time, only a start time. No resurrection, no salvation, nothing to be saved or redeemed. The most fundamental, central message of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is utterly nullified in that program.
Did you overlook this somehow, in all your reading?
https://www.lds.org/manual/book-of-morm ... 4?lang=engIn Mosiah 13:27–28, Abinadi corrected a false idea expressed by King Noah’s priests (see Mosiah 12:31–32). He taught that obedience to the law of Moses alone could not bring them salvation. They all had need of the Savior to atone (pay the price) for their sins or “they must unavoidably perish, notwithstanding the law of Moses.”
Elder Bruce R. McConkie, who was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, applied that same lesson to our day:
“Now let us suppose a modern case. Suppose we have the scriptures, the gospel, the priesthood, the Church, the ordinances, the organization, even the keys of the kingdom—everything that now is, down to the last jot and tittle—and yet there is no atonement of Christ. What then? Can we be saved? Will all our good works save us? Will we be rewarded for all our righteousness?
“Most assuredly we will not. We are not saved by works alone, no matter how good; we are saved because God sent his Son to shed his blood in Gethsemane and on Calvary that all through him might ransomed be. We are saved by the blood of Christ (Acts 20:28; 1 Cor. 6:20).
“To paraphrase Abinadi: ‘Salvation doth not come by the Church alone; and were it not for the atonement, given by the grace of God as a free gift, all men must unavoidably perish, and this notwithstanding the Church and all that appertains to it’” (Doctrines of the Restoration: Sermons and Writings of Bruce R. McConkie, ed. Mark L. McConkie [1989], 76).
