Adam was alienated from God from the first. Adam and all his kind were hit with a string of curses. The theologians want the curses to begin with "the Fall," but the theologians impose thereby a sterile silence over the moral lessons of Eden. From the first, Adam yearns for that-which-is-not-God, and the story of Adam and then Adam-and-Eve is the unremitting story of cursing-for-yearning.
Wanting something even more than his insatiable eyes could see, Adam was granted "the woman." This connubial arrangement was surely unnecessary for any simple purpose of giving the man companionship. As John the Baptist might have said it, God could have made of the stones children for Adam. As it transpired, the curse of sexual desire was imposed upon humanity.
That sex can be pleasurable, and that it can be part of wholesome relationships, are considerations immaterial to the realization that sex-capable humanity is burdened in a manner that does not encumber the sexless angels. As a parallel, the human capacity for anger can be enlivening in noble causes, and anger can reside in fundamentally wholesome persons, but as a general proposition people would be better off without it. Jesus, after all, tells his followers to be as cunning as serpents and as innocent as doves, not as wrathful as serpents and as innocent as doves.
And who would deny that sex is a cauldron of roiling impulses, poured out moreover as if a profane libation of ill-directed and unsanctified worship? In its typical manifestation, sex is the physically overlording male crouching down as if transfixed by the protruding robustness of the nubile female. And the female, ever aware of the intrusive insistence of the male, cannot be simultaneously unaware of the male's culminating submission to the female's allure. God's heaven and the great chasm of space will make by contrast the mutual prostrations of the couple seem little more than the writhing of worms, yet their bowings unto each other are of no small magnitude alongside the dust-slithering of the serpent.
Scripture, of course, will tell what men and women have made of sex--as though humanity would need even that testimony to know how people use and misuse their urges. About the only thing that could make the matter worse would be the conceit that the often fumbling and failing and frustrating (or, worse yet, for a doom-struck time, transporting) phenomenon of sex is divinely-ordained. The insistence of some Christian sects on corralling and branding "God's gift" of sexuality--making it into a social-control apportionment dispensed by the denominations--is a practice of psychological extortion that would bring a blush to the most calloused of pagan temple-prostitutes.
What the pages of Genesis tell us is not the "why" of our existence, but rather the ineffable quality of the "why" questions themselves. This is of the utmost importance if we are to approach properly the greatest of "how" questions--how to be saved. We do not know from whence the elements of ourselves arise, and we cannot expect a formula by which to order those elements. Much less can we expect any direction toward salvation that does not involve us casting ourselves from the unknown of our origin into an unknown in which God must exist.
John the Baptist asked of certain of the Pharisees and Sadducees, "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Who indeed--but it is the force of the Baptist's question, and not its answer, that serves its purpose--a deterrent to the hypocritical, and a goad to the truly penitent.
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