Eden

From dKosopedia

Category: Bible

The Garden of Eden is a place, described in the Bible, in which God creates man and woman and where they live until they are unable to resist the temptation to do what God forbids them to do (eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) and are exiled from the Garden forever. The Biblical description seems to put it somewhere in Iraq, which is where some of the first human cities arose (it was then known as "Sumeria"). A significant portion of the conservative community in the United States distrusts intellectuals generally, seeing them, like Eve in the eyes of the people who take this view, as people who have compromised their morals to obtain knowledge.

Eden is sometimes used in Science as a metaphor for the origin place of the human race (a place increasingly viewed to be in Africa). It is also used as a reference to a time or place of innocence or to a uptopia.

The notion of the fruit of the forbidden tree in the Garden, is used in U.S. Constitutional Law to refer to the concept that evidence obtained using other evidence which is obtained in violation of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution may not be used against a defendant in Court, even if the additional evidence was reduced to possession using lawful means such as a search warrant.

Many types of Christianity look to the story of the Garden of Eden for a core theological principal called original sin, which states that from the time of Eden onward, humans are fundamentally sinful from birth onward and are only able to overcome this through the assistance of Jesus Christ.

An immportant part of the debate over separation of church and state and Teaching Evolution is whether it is constitutional to teach the story of the Garden of Eden as fact, rather than myth, in U.S. public schools. Many Evangelical Christians feel that teaching the story as myth discounts their worldview that the Bible is inerrent truth, but others feel that teaching the story as fact or history amounts to state establishment of religion in violation of the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Courts have universally taken the later view.

Eden is also a term used metaphorically to refer to a utopia generally.