Adam’s first mistake was letting Eve wander off alone with that snake.
His second was listening to her.
Hey, Adam, you’ve gotta try this stuff! It’s off the chain.
His third was taking a bite.
And that’s how Adam closed the deal turning over dominion to the lords of the snake.
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Denise offers the prompt word “close” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Genesis 3:17 KJV – 17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
In the 19th century logicians simulated, and thereby simplified, the real world understanding of truth by assigning true/false (one/zero) values to logical connectives in truth tables. Although this was ingenious, the ancient liar paradox remained to haunt the simulation.
The liar paradox gets started by assuming the existence of a Liar who always lies. It immediately reaches its punchline by having that Liar assert as true: This statement is false.
What was forgotten in modern attempts to sanitize the liar was that a truth table only discerns between true and false, one and zero, not between truth and lie. The real world ethical understanding of truth gets covered by a coat of white paint in modern logic. Even in the ancient paradox, the ethical problem got a white-wash as well because a real world deceiver is worse than this hypothetical Liar. A real world deceiver is even more deceptive because he doesn’t always lie.
There’s an older story than the Greek one about the Liar. In Genesis 3, we read about the first deception with death being its real world consequence.
There are many today who see themselves as too “rational” to believe that the deception and fall as mentioned in Genesis 3 actually happened. I suspect that their belief in modern rationality has led them to prefer reality white-washed into truth tables containing only ones and zeros. With a truth table it is easy to forget that a falsehood is the word of a lying deceiver. Speaking such deception is an act of evil, not just a zero in a computer program.
A solution to the Liar paradox would be to reject the Liar without taking seriously anything he had to say. This is what people do in the real world. When they hear lies, they reject the liars. They don’t fret about the English language’s ability to express garbage. People are free to lie. The structure of language itself doesn’t stop them.
If falsehood is a lying deception, what then is truth? The truth has been white-washed as well. We find it easier today to think of truth as an “it”. But if one wants to recover the real world significance of falsehood as deception, as I do, then truth would have to be ethical as well.
Only a living person can be ethical. Only an ethical person can show others through His true words the way to life. Such a Person could be seen as being the truth.
Good roots avoid the sunbeams.
They much prefer the dark
Away from light and sources bright.
They love the mysteries of night.
That’s where they leave their mark.
But leaves prefer the sunlight.
That’s where they dream to toil
And offer all until the Fall
To help their Whole stand true and tall
Then rest on peaceful soil.
“The roots are also incredibly light-sensitive; but in contrast to the leaves, they don’t like light at all.” Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, Island Press, translated by Joan Benham, 2015, page 50. If you think plants are vegetables, this book is worth reading.
Linked to dVerse Poetics hosted by Björn Rudberg with “soil” as the prompt.
Linked to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads for their Tuesday Platform imagined by Marian.
Photo: “The Details of Blooming” by the author. The scene is from the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 