Are we all descendants of Adam and Eve?

The talking snake. Do you take Donald Duck seriously?

We live in hope.

The fact that a talking snake is used should make it obvious that the intelligence is not "besides" man - it is man. Trouble with mankind began when God created them with the ability to choose. It wasn't a "lying" intelligence outside of them. It was an intelligence within them with the ability to choose. God put it there. Indeed, why, if there supposedly was no death before "the fall"? Clearly, Adam and Eve were aquainted with death. They had seen things die - lions eating gazelles, for example. What they weren't aquainted with was their own death. Realizing one's own mortality is yet another aspect of growing up. Again, "it" is not an external entity. Why did the woman think of eating the fruit first? Well, it was a fifty-fifty proposition. If the man had thought of it first, would it really make any difference to the story? If there was a talking snake (tee hee) and if it did know that they would die, what it wanted was irrelevant. It knew that they would die whether they ate the fruit or not. What promise of salvation? All Adam and Eve are promised in the story is blood, sweat, toil and tears. It's a throw-away character. It serves its purpose and then it's gone. The questions in Eve's mind (about God's veracity, for one thing) had to be voiced in some way for the audience. If Shakespeare had written Genesis, it would have been a soliloquy, "To eat or not to eat...."It's yet another indication that the character is not real. We don't know that he didn't. Because the snake is in all of us. He represents human intelligence.

If you mean that God is the other intelligence, okay. If you mean that there is another intelligent source of evil - i.e "Satan" - then no. The story is pretty plain; the snake is a fictional character representing man's ability to make decisions, including bad ones. You seem hell bent on using ad hominem instead of addressing the argument. On the contrary, it would be nice to have a Sky Daddy to make every choice for me so I wouldn't have to take responsibility for anything. That isn't in the story. Isn't it bad enough that Adam and Eve lost their son? Why do you have to put the blame on them when the story doesn't? God puts the responsibility squarely on Cain, not on any inheritance. What if pigs had wings? See Wikipedia:

quote:

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Ships made of wood required a flexible material, insoluble in water, to seal the spaces between planks. Pine pitch was often mixed with fibers like hemp to caulk spaces which might otherwise leak. Crude gum or oleoresin can be collected from the wounds of living pine trees.

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Of course there was oil in the ground before the flood - not because of any "previous world" but because the world was already very very old by the time the flood (supposedly) happened. It isn't said by the Bible.

God told Cain what the first step was in "crushing the snake": don't let it in the house.

If all else fails, try a bigger shoehorn.