Adam's Apple: A Moral Dilemma

I am not an Atheist. I swear I am not! But at the same time I am also not a believer of God. I am what you can call a “liberal atheist”, a category that falls somewhere between absolute faith in God and Atheism. And that, I believe, is the reason why I am in a dilemma. The dilemma concerns Adam, the first man and the apple that he supposedly ate and thus committed the “Original Sin”, the consequences of which we are all witnessing even today.

Before I talk about my dilemma let me get one thing straight. Did Adam or Eve really eat an apple? The Bible for sure does not say that Adam ate an apple. According to the “Book of Genesis” Adam ate “the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. Then how come apple came to be associated with this “fruit”?

One possible explanation is that the Latin word for evil is malum and the Latin word for apple is also malum. In the fourth century AD, the word malum appeared in the Latin Vulgate translation of Genesis in the phrase ‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’. From that time on people began to associate the apple with the fruit which Adam and Eve ate. Does this mean, then, that apple is an evil fruit? I guess that is the reason why the sweetness of an apple is only skin deep and the heart of the apple is as bitter and tasteless as it can be? But then that’s beside my point.

My dilemma is why eating the apple (or whichever fruit it was) was The Original Sin, when it gave Adam and Eve the knowledge to decide what was good and what was bad? Is acquiring the knowledge to separate the good from the bad a sin? After eating the fruit Adam and Eve became shameful of their nakedness. If being naked in front of others is indeed a shameful deed, then does this mean that God wanted us all to commit this shameful act day after day throughout our lives? And yet being aware of the good and the bad was the sin and the act of being naked was not. Isn’t there an inconsistency here?

Had Adam and Eve not eaten the apple, then in their blissful ignorance of the good or the bad, they might have done harm to each other and might have even killed each other. Then that would not have been a sin? A logical conclusion from this argument is that, you will be charged for your sinful act or crime only if you are aware that you are committing a sinful act. Like small children, who don’t know what is good and what is bad, are forgiven for all their acts because of their ignorance. Is ignorance bliss then? If we believe The Bible it is.


Then this also means that even if we spend our entire lives doing all the good deeds that The Bible dictates us to do, we will still be sinners by the very fact of being grown ups and having the knowledge to decide what is good and what is bad. Quite a scary and bleak proposition, isn’t it? And doesn’t this make the Biblical logic a little bit flawed?

Now you may dismiss me by saying that I am not a believer of God, but then I am not an atheist either. I am only amenable to my logic. And my logic fails to solve this dilemma. Any enlightened soul who may read this is more than welcome to solve my dilemma.