The first 3 chapters of Genesis

hmm i hope you really don't think to be a christian you *have* to believe this to be a christian, because no christian sect believes all of this.
do you think catholicism and orthodox are out there?, because they do not believe in the things people have said original sin is on here, infact all i've seen on EvC are people with their own interpretations claiming its mainstream and all christians agree with them, when in fact this is untrue

they vary quite a bit, if you reread the wiki, they do have "original sin" but its nothing like luther had, they are not doomed to hell, i would say its more like a parent gambling away all thier money and the children born to them has to start from a level of little money and struggling
they don't believe the same as the evangelical, or calvinists or what have you, they consider adams sin harming mankinds state not, causing them to go to hell that sounds like moving the goal posts to me percy they are still christians arn't they? what difference does where the church is make?why is arguing that there isn't a real "mainstream Christian belief"
denal? i've never heard of a church agreeing with another throughout history. why is it that when someone says they accept jesus as god and they do things someone disagrees with do they get called not a christian because of things they do that someone else doesn't do?i mean this is from the "main stream" churchs such as roman catholics, carismatics, lutherans, LDS, etc
calling certian things "main stream beliefs" ignores the fact that they are not main stream if you ask multipul churchs if they are.you can generize their beliefs to the point that they are so deluted that they look the same but then they are nothing like what the sect believes, sorry but thats what you are doing.
if they considered your criteria as what it takes to be a christian, then i would love it, because then they would all agree and we wouldn't have people killing each other for religious reasons ever again, but they don't agree, as even EvC shows Edited by AdminPD, : Off Topic Warning

this line of argument is flawed. they are fallen so what they think of the fall and whether there was a fall is useless because they are fallen, isn't that known as a circlar argument? sorry but that doesn't work, the authors of the text did not believe in original sin or a fall as people think of it, so why would they need to know about a fall? if you read the text it explains things that the people in the story have never experianced so why would they matter? that is unless the story is to explain things about the world and not some magical unevident "Fall" from grace that you claim happenedoutside of the interpretation of paul where does it say they fell from grace and were cursed to hell?

this could be, many stories from the area seem to indicate the importance of knowledge being part of being a god, so this maybe why god didn't want them to eat from it i think that they may have not known what the tree of life was at all not sure since the story is very undetailedi think one of the problems is the way the translators setup how to read it, since hebrew doesn't really have line-breaks many of the things we think would be the end of the story arn't really
look at the begining of genesis 2 as jar has pointed out its part of genesis one, the translaters did this on purpose to link the two stories togethereven the last line before adam and eve are removed from eden shows that someone didn't do a good job editing it the way its edited makes it harder to figure out how the story is suppose to flow, though i have read that many critics think that someone hacked something out
of course 3:23 is to explain why man isn't in eden and 3:24 is why he can't get back in if you read this, why does god put angels in the garden? to guard the tree of life. why? because god did not want man to become like god, immortal
thats why they were kicked from eden, god didn't want adam and eve to get a shot at the tree of life and to be immortal.
knowing something means you might act on it

evidence of this please, i don't even think paul or augustine would agree with you on that one faith. plus if we have vulnerability to disease why are some folks more resistent to things that should kill them, that their is no real treatment for like HIV?please show where it says in any part of the OT or NT that its a disease of some sorti find it funny that YECs and fundies need to co-opt evolution and germ theory to make this nonsense workEdited by ReverendDG, : No reason given.

because its a story and they are needed to be for the rest of the events to work?
really speculation is all we have for this, they may have explained it, but somehow it god taken out at a later point, the flow of the story kind of shows this anywayits a myth it doesn't have to make sense though