The Default

“I forgot. My bad. Sorry.”

The Question: Regarding the default of Adam and Eve, do I think Adam and Eve committed evil? Consider the nature of their oath, the reasons for their actions, and the consequences of their actions. What do you think of their punishment? Was it fair? What does their treatment tell you about the mercy and forgiveness of our Creator Son and his universe government?

As we define evil in The Urantia Book as either ignorance (“I didn’t know or understand”) or as error (“Holy crap! I screwed up this time!”), they certainly did commit evil. The type of evil could fall in either the ignorance or the error category, but we don’t really know exactly what they knew or when they knew it. We were told that they were warned by Solonia, that pesky “voice the garden,” a couple of times about what the program was and any deviation of it would be considered a default of their mission. Even with their good intentions (you know, the road to hell is paved with them), and the fact that Eve was really misled and likely lied to (not unlike “you can keep your own doctor”), it was still a default–they had “… transgressed the Garden covenant; that they had disobeyed the instructions of the Melchizedeks; that they had defaulted in the execution of their oaths of trust to the sovereign of the universe.” (UB75:4.2)

And it gets worse: “Eve had consented to participate in the practice of good and evil. Good is the carrying out of the divine plans; sin is a deliberate transgression of the divine will; evil is the misadaptation of plans and the maladjustment of techniques resulting in universe disharmony and planetary confusion.

“Every time the Garden pair had partaken of the fruit of the tree of life, they had been warned by the archangel custodian to refrain from yielding to the suggestions of Caligastia to combine good and evil. They had been thus admonished: ‘In the day that you commingle good and evil, you shall surely become as the mortals of the realm; you shall surely die.’

“Eve had told Cano of this oft-repeated warning on the fateful occasion of their secret meeting, but Cano, not knowing the import or significance of such admonitions…” (“No biggie. What are they going to do, kill you?), “…had assured her that men and women with good motives and true intentions could do no evil; that she should surely not die but rather live anew in the person of their offspring, who would grow up to bless and stabilize the world.

“Even though this project of modifying the divine plan had been conceived and executed with entire sincerity and with only the highest motives concerning the welfare of the world, it constituted evil because it represented the wrong way to achieve righteous ends, because it departed from the right way, the divine plan.” (UB75:4.3-8)

So we see this was not some simple, “oops, I forgot” sort of an affair. It was, perhaps, the biggest affair the planet had and has ever experienced!

Their “punishment” was foretold. Did they think the powers that be were just kidding around? And, as usual, the kids get the brunt of the punishment. Whatever will become of those youngsters sitting around Edentia?

But, alas, mercy prevailed. “When all is summed up, Adam and Eve made a mighty contribution to the speedy civilization and accelerated biologic progress of the human race. They left a great culture on earth, but it was not possible for such an advanced civilization to survive in the face of the early dilution and the eventual submergence of the Adamic inheritance. It is the people who make a civilization; civilization does not make the people.” (UB76:6.4) They now sit in Satania on the counsel of the four and twenty elders.

All’s well that ends well.

© James Leese 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020