truthlover
It's a story. Personally, I think the serpent is a great addition to the story, and that way there's also an explanation for the rather bizarre way snakes travel.
Certainly it is a story. God is a part of a story, that does not mean that there is really a God either. The story could just be emphasizing that we are responsible for our choices and cannot be complacent in our innocence with the notion that we are incapable of making wrong choices.
An allegory cannot be expected to answer every situation. Exceptions do not render the lesson of an allegory invalid. Despite encountering situations where good and evil has not been defined for us, the lesson that good and evil are determined by God, not man, and that moral decisions should be based on God's determinations, remains a valid lesson even when we're faced with situations where we don't know God's determination.
I agree about allegory being only so efficient at lessons, however, I cannot see that good and evil are based on God's determinations since we are the only ones that bitch about injustice. We seldom give thought about the nature of the situations that require us to make decisions that, in the moment, are all that we are capable given imperfect information, and as such we cannot be expected to make but imperfect decisions.
A god, on the other hand, by definition having perfect information cannot be expected to be arbiter of justice since there is no situation to which God could claim an injustice as He cannot possibly be surprised by any given situation.{Makes you wonder why he had such a bug up his ass over Sodom and Gomorrah eh?}
Nor can we expect him to have an understanding of the innumerable balancing acts one makes in the course of living a life of limited span and essentially unlimited experience possibilities.
``A paradox is not a conflict within reality. It is a conflict between
reality and your feeling of what reality should be like.''
- Richard Feynman
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