I get a lot of email but most of it is spam. But some are from innocent bystanding readers who’ve witnessed a Rey-Post-Astrophe and had some questions. More often than not, these folk drop me a line and I stammer out an answer but some questions have come up often enough that I feel confident in rewording the questions and sharing my general response sharing my response and Putting It Out There as an Old Testament witness (you know, where you hiss as you walk by the ashes of a blog and see the goatlings prancing about and not even the Spammers make their home there since its so devoid of life). As homage to Click and Clack, here is my first Stump the Chump question plus response: If Adam and Evil were tricked by the Devil—why did they get in trouble?
I’ll start with a (fake) example using my kids. I tell my oldest that he is not to touch anything in my office, that the desk is to remain pristine and that he shouldn’t be playing in there. I tell my daughter “No one goes here.” So my son tells my daughter to play in the office giving her toys and what not and even tells her what she should be doing. So she goes into the office, plays, throws glass and completely obliterates my office.
I get into my office and see the destruction and somehow I uncover the truth: my son told my daughter to do this and she up and went nuts with it. Question: who gets in trouble?
My son definitely gets in trouble for knowingly sending someone else to do something I hated. But my daughter will also get in trouble, not only because she went into my office but because she wreaked havoc in the office. Instead of asking me she took her big brother as the ultimate authority in doing stuff in a place I prohibited.
It would only be fair that they both get in trouble.
So, in the Genesis 2 and 3 story, who got in trouble? Well, Adam and Eve definitely got in trouble but we also see that the Serpent got in trouble. So much so that he’s promised a crushing defeat. So Adam and Eve got in trouble because they did wrong but probably not as much trouble as the Serpent did!
2 replies on “Stump The Chump 01”
ah – but what if daddy intentionally leaves temptation in the way, and still gets angry? Is that fair? Like, you know your daughter has an obsession with staplers, so you leave the new big shiny one out, with the new pink staples you just bought, just to see what happens. Why aren’t you in trouble too?
That’s so good that I’m going to have to make a stump the chump for it.