Not Original, Not Sin
It was a setup, I tell ya! This week, we're focusing on "the fall," and the two poor suckers who were set up to take that fall. First, we're going through the story of Adam, Eve, the tree and the snake, and parsing out exactly what did and didn't happen in Eden. Who lied and who told the truth? Who knew what and when did they know it? Who, if anybody, actually committed a sin? Then, speaking of sin, we're going to get original. What is the doctrine of "original sin"? Is it in the Bible? Where did it come from, and should we be worried about it, or can we all just relax?
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Dan McClellan So, here's where I'm going to say something that is going to annoy an awful lot of people. You can define sin about as well as you can define, what, 6'7"?"
Dan Beecher It's 100% vibes.
Dan McClellan Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.
Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.
Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?
Dan Beecher Oh, man. I'm feeling sinful. Just absolutely sinful.
Dan McClellan That's kind of your baseline, isn't it?
Dan Beecher That's just norm. That's like standard, but also feels like it was just born there. You know what I mean?
Dan McClellan Oh, okay.
Dan Beecher You're- Yeah. That's me tipping off what we're going to be talking about, I guess.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher I'm very subtle.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher I don't know if you guys know that about me, but yeah.
Dan McClellan That's also your baseline.
Dan Beecher Subtlety. Subtlety, it's one of the great markers of my character. It's true. So today, we're going to be talking, first, we're going to do a chapter and verse.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher And we're going to talk about the Garden of Eden, and we're going to talk about Adam and Eve specifically.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher We've talked a lot about Genesis 1, 2, little 3, little 4.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher We're mostly doing 2 into 3 now.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher We're going to get that creation, not the creation story, the fall.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher The fall.
Dan McClellan We're going to talk about some of the peculiarities of this story as well.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan The unanswered things, where we do an awful lot to fill in the gap. There's a lot of frog DNA that we're just chucking in there- ... to fill in the gaps, and that results in a weird Adam and Eve story where they can turn invisible and all this kind of stuff.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Sure. Why not?
Dan McClellan Asexual reproduction. What do we call it? Yeah, I don't know.
Dan Beecher Sure.
Dan McClellan Abiogenesis, let's call it that.
Dan Beecher Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Dan McClellan I mean- As a result of that- Yeah ... rare species of frog DNA getting injected in there. If anybody should have something to do with abiogenesis, it's Adam and Eve. You would think. You would think.
Dan Beecher So, I think that's great.
Dan McClellan My high school daughter is reading "Jurassic Park" right now- ... in her class, and so we got her a couple of her own copies, and it's fun to revisit what it was like to read that book back in the '90s.
Dan Beecher They made a book of that? That's interesting.
Dan McClellan They did. They did make a book out of it. They decided the movies were so successful, they might as well write a book, and a book that was so good I ended up reading pretty much everything else that Michael Crichton wrote.
Dan Beecher Oh.
Dan McClellan And then watched some of the movies they made of those things, which were not nearly as good.
Dan Beecher So. Yeah, well, Spielberg tends to make a fine movie.
Dan McClellan Anyway. Yeah, he does.
Dan Beecher Moving on. In the second half of our show, we are going to sort of jump off from that, and we'll do a What Is That? about original sin.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher So, that'll be exciting and fun and weird.
Dan McClellan So hot right now.
Dan Beecher Because- Yeah ... everything about the Bible is weird to me. So, let's dive in with chapter and verse.
Dan McClellan All right.
Dan Beecher You said you wanted to start in chapter 2.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Now, most of chapter 2 is Adam sitting around in a garden all by himself- ... and God trying to make him less bored.
Dan McClellan Yeah, twiddling his ribs. The Garden of Eden story really starts in the second half of Genesis 2:4, and then runs through the end of Genesis chapter 3, so 3:24 is the end of the Garden of Eden story. Chapter 4 is a different story altogether.
Dan Beecher Wow.
Dan McClellan But we get this creation account. All this is happening on one day. We've discussed in the past about how Genesis 1:1 through the first half of Genesis 2:4 is a separate creation account.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan It's an entirely different creation account that is trying to correct a lot of the stuff that's going on in our creation account. But we have in verse 7, "Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." And reams and reams of- ... books have been written on this passage alone, but I really like the theory that what we have is basically a divine image being made, where- Right ... in this time and place, divine images would've been made primarily of clay, but also of stone and things like that. But we can represent it as clay, and there would usually be some kind of enlivening ritual or activation ritual where the agency of the deity would enter the statue or the standing stone, probably. And here, we have a very similar thing, where the dust of the ground is, this is where clay comes from, and the word "formed" there is, if I'm not mistaken, it's yatar, yeah, yatar, which is the word that is used to refer to making pottery.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Used in making clay, and then breathes the breath of life into the human's nostrils. And this is one of the illustrations of the fact that breath was considered fundamentally constitutive, or constitutive for all the people who feel like correcting my pronunciation, of life. And so breath is what causes life to be in this story. And then God plants a garden in Eden and chucks the man in there whom he had formed, according to verse 8.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And we've talked in the past about how there's some squirrelly translation going on in these passages, where the translators try to turn past tense verbs into pluperfect verbs, and basically what that means is they change, "God caused this to happen," to, "God had caused this to happen," because the order of events in Genesis 2 is- Different from the order of events- Yeah ...
Dan Beecher in Genesis 1.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher Sure. And, so you've got God planting this garden.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher And he throws in a couple trees- Yes ... very curiously, I think.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher I think it is so weird to throw in trees that he knows... It's like putting a power socket into the baby's room- Yeah ... without any covers or anything, and just being like, "Don't touch that now."
Dan McClellan Yeah. It's like MacGuffin central. God has no use for these trees. God has- Right ... just created this garden and was like, "Bam, trees. Oh, by the way, don't touch that one."
Dan Beecher Yeah, that was bad.
Dan McClellan Could you get any more MacGuffin-y? Obviously, this is a lesson in search of a narrative.
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan And so in verse nine, "Out of the ground, the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." So we've got these two trees, and this is one of the unanswered questions of the story of Adam and Eve, because later on, at the end of the story, and spoiler alert if you haven't read the story yet- If you've never heard the Adam and Eve story- Yes ...
Dan Beecher podcast listener who's listening to a show about the Bible.
Dan McClellan Yes. God is going to kick them out of the Garden of Eden and then put cherubim guarding the entry, so that they cannot partake of the tree of life because if they do that, they would live forever. Again, MacGuffin alert. Why this? Because in Genesis in verse 15, 16, in verse 17, or 16 and 17, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die." So this does not say, "Don't partake of the tree of life." So the question is, were Adam and Eve partaking of the tree of life the entire time?
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan Okay.
Dan Beecher That's one I've never thought about before.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher I like that.
Dan McClellan And then is God kicking them out to stop them from continuing to eat from the tree, or are they not even eating from the tree to begin with, and then God is like, "Because of these new circumstances, oh, we don't want them to suddenly eat from the tree"? And this is something that a lot of Christians will say, Adam's transgression and Eve's transgression brings death into the world. Prior to that, there's no death.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan In order to conclude that, you have to conclude that they were eating from that tree the whole time.
Dan Beecher Well, you don't have to conclude it- Well- ... but that's certainly one of the, that seems like the way that you would do it. Yeah, but- Although, if you conclude that, then it makes one wonder, is the way that God is immortal just that he keeps eating that? Well- You know what I mean?
Dan McClellan ... it raises more questions than it answers, because- Yeah ... because let's see. If they are eating from it already, then they should already be immortal.
Dan Beecher Immortal.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So, stopping them from eating from the tree would not suddenly end their immortality, unless eating from the tree just keeps you alive temporarily.
Dan Beecher Yeah. It's not permanent immortality.
Dan McClellan Right.
Dan Beecher It's just current immortality.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And that's not really what we think of when we think of this. And God's warning in chapter three, "If they take and eat from it, they will live forever." That's a one-time thing.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So, what's going on here?
Dan Beecher It's all very confusing.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And then that brings us to verse 17, "In the day you eat of it, you shall die." We've talked about this before as well.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan The consensus view is that this means if you eat from that tree, you will be put to death relatively immediately.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan On that day, within that 24-hour period, you are executed. That is what the Hebrew demands we understand it to be saying. And that doesn't happen. So God's threat doesn't happen, and then when we get to the curses, and we'll get to them in a moment, there's no indication that they were anything other than mortal the entire time.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan But this is one of the unanswered questions. If this is how the story, how we have it, if that's how the story was originally read and originally, whether it was performed, read out loud, whatever, how it was originally consumed, either the audience is not paying attention to these questions because the story is serving some other function, or they already have a background in this. They're bringing the correct knowledge to this story that we don't have access to.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Or there's something going on that's missing. They have additional text, additional stories that we don't have. But, I digress. Immediately, God is like, "Hmm, something's missing. It is not good that the man should be alone." And this is one of the big distinctions between this creation account and the creation account in chapter one, because here God creates something and then goes, "Oh, my creation is not good."
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Chapter one, God creates. Everything God creates, God goes, "Damn, that's good."
Dan Beecher Nailed it.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Again. Man, I am six for six on this.
Dan McClellan So he says, "I will make him," the NRSVUE says, "a helper as his partner." This is a phrase that has taken on increased significance these days- Oh my gosh ... as our connecto, particularly as the University of Oklahoma has decided that it is not in the business of educating people anymore. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't look it up. You will just get depressed.
Dan Beecher Or if you do look it up, you have to read the essay, and then read the essay- Read the essay ... that the essay was supposed to be about.
Dan McClellan Oh my gosh, yes.
Dan Beecher You have to read it. You can't just get mad- ... because of the headline.
Dan McClellan And then, so God's like, "I'm going to make..." Literally, it's helper equal to, equivalent to, sufficient for, something like that. A suitable helper.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan So God's like, "Let's make some animals." Starts making animals out of the ground- Yeah ... just like the human was made, and brings them to Adam. And Adam's like, "Not for me, not for me. Ew, what are you thinking here?"
Dan Beecher This thing doesn't even...
Dan McClellan I mean- ...
Dan Beecher presumably, actually, they do talk because we're going to learn later, at least one of them has a full grasp of speech.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher So I'm going to presume that they all do.
Dan McClellan They could, yeah. Again, it's something that's not in the narrative, like the fact that the snake is just like, "What's up, dude?" And he's like, "Chilling."
Dan Beecher That's- I think it is in the narrative because these are the things that God is creating to keep Adam company. So I feel like it makes sense to assume that if that is the point of these animals, and then later on in the narrative, one of the animals talks, I think it is reasonable to say these animals talk, cattle, birds, all the things that they're... He's having conversations. They're just not that interesting.
Dan McClellan Well, and he's giving them names.
Dan Beecher Yeah. He's naming everything- Yeah ...
Dan McClellan again. So it's very Aesopy- Yeah ... at this point in the story.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan "All the cattle, all the birds of the air, every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner." Whether he just wanted, "I need something with a little more cake on it.
Dan Beecher I need..."
Dan McClellan Whatever he was looking for, the animals were not providing it. So, "God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. Then he took one of his," ribs is how we've translated it. The word there, it literally means sides.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan One of his sides, and this word is never used to refer to human anatomy anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. It's used to refer to architectural sides or sometimes the sides of a ship, and people think, well, you've got these pieces of wood that go up the sides of a ship. You've got beams on the side of a building. So maybe this is supposed to be metaphorical reference to ribs, but it could also mean just a hunk of his side.
Dan Beecher Yeah. I mean, the first time you and I talked about this on the show, I became, and remain, relatively convinced that it's supposed to just mean he just split the dude in half and made half him and half her.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher It's one side is him, one side is her. This rib thing is just astounding. And probably just comes from a need for the patriarchy to have the man be the progenitor of the thing and the woman be less than the man in some way.
Dan McClellan Yeah, and the story says he, "Took one of his," whatever, "and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib," or whatever, "that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man." And yeah, it does sound kind of like Aristophanes' - Oh, gosh. It's been a rough morning. Aristophanes' myth from Plato's Symposium, which is where all humans were originally part of a dual entity- Right ... which had either two sets of male genitalia, two sets of female genitalia, or one male, one female. They were split in half, and then we spend our lives trying to reunite with the other half.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So it sounds an awful lot like that. It could be something like that, but it's not exactly clear. But the man then says, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called woman for out of man this one was taken." So this is a folk etymology for the Hebrew word ishah.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Because ish means man, ishah means woman. That must mean from man or something like that. But bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh suggests that this hunk of whatever that was taken out of Adam included bone and flesh.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So, when we talk about going out for ribs, we're not chomping on the bone most of the time. There's meat on the bone that we're actually interested in. So maybe this has reference to just a big chunk of bone and flesh.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan But the idea seems to be that all the other animals were created from the dust of the earth, but for a helper that is suitable, it needs to be created from the man. So that seems to be what the idea is- Yeah ... which is subordinating woman to man. Man has a primacy of place, is the original human. This is the... I don't know if you saw "Multiplicity," but- We're not quite to Steve yet, but- I was going to say, wow. That is a '90s deep cut.
Dan Beecher And not particularly relevant. Don't go watch the movie to try and figure anything out from this stuff.
Dan McClellan It's not going to have anything to do with Adam and Eve, yeah. But then we get the famous etiology for pair bonding and independent kinship units. "Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh." The idea is, look, you were torn apart from one entity, and so you become one flesh. You kind of return to the primordial state of being- Yeah ... one entity. And it's just a folk etiology for pair bonding and for independent kinship units because your dad kicks you out of the house and says, "Get out of my garage. I need this. My midlife crisis is starting. I need to have a band in here."
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And so you have to go off and start your own household. This is not a prescription for monogamy or homosexuality or anything like that. It's just a folk etiology. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. And so they're in a state of innocence, and the idea here seems to be that they are juvenile. They have not matured yet. Just like when you have kids running around, they want naked time to run around nude. They're not ashamed. So that's basically what's going on here. And then we get to- I don't know.
Dan Beecher I'm going to push back on that just a little bit because- Okay ... I think that, or the way I read it, at least now, and you can tell me if I'm wrong on this, is just that what it's setting up is the fact that they don't have a sense of the knowledge of good and evil. They don't have that yet. They haven't eaten that fruit. And first of all, I think it's weird that nakedness is already being considered basically a function of evil. Their shame over their nakedness, when that shame rolls around, it's because they know what good and evil are. I think that that's weird. But it's a norm now, too, and so that's fine. But I guess my point is just that it seems to me like what it's saying is they just don't have that in them. They don't have a sense of good or evil or what they- Yeah ... should or shouldn't be ashamed of.
Dan McClellan And I think that that is a function of the lack of maturity, that that part of the maturation process is learning the difference between good and evil, learning that you ought to be ashamed of being naked- Yeah ... in front of other people, learning all these things, that you should be wearing clothes, stuff like that. Because the nudity in the Hebrew Bible, it's not like an erotic state- Right ... in the Hebrew Bible. It is always about shame.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And whether it's Noah, whether it's people who want to pretend that the Bible says women have to cover up parts of their body so men don't lust after them, nothing ever says nudity is associated with lust or anything like that. It is always about shame.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And I think the story is suggesting that as you get older, as you mature, part of right and wrong is feeling shame about your body- Yeah ... in a nude state.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan We have in the prophecy in Isaiah 7. Okay, so a young woman has conceived and will bear a child. And what does it say in the next verse? "He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good." So that's saying before he grows up, before he matures.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So one of the things you learn as you mature is the difference between good and evil, how to refuse the evil and choose the good. So I think that's what's going on here. They're created like full size, adult size humans- Right ... but they're in a mental and emotional state of immaturity. So now we've moved from multiplicity to big. I got it.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So- It's a wonderful analogy there.
Dan Beecher So we get- So now we're moving on to chapter three.
Dan McClellan Chapter three is the big one.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Now we... Go ahead.
Dan Beecher Well, no. It starts out with the serpent, is what I was going to say.
Dan McClellan Right. Now, it says the serpent is more arum, is the Hebrew word, which can mean crafty, but also means nude. Which is funny because we just got done talking about how the man and his wife were arumim.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And so now we're talking about how the serpent is arum, more arum than any of the other- Right ... animals that the Lord God had made.
Dan Beecher Which, by the way, it must mean crafty, because if it meant naked, you can't be more naked than the other wild animals in the garden. Well- Nakedness seems to be, unless we're talking about fur- Yeah, which snakes don't have no fur. They got no fur.
Dan McClellan And here's another unanswered question. Does this snake have legs?
Dan Beecher Yeah. Because that- Put a pin in that.
Dan McClellan Okay.
Dan Beecher Pins.
Dan McClellan Because yeah.
Dan Beecher Yeah. It does seem like this snake is walking around.
Dan McClellan And the snake comes up to the woman and says, because snakes talk- Mm-hmm ... in this Aesopian primordial world "Did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" So, two unanswered questions here. How did the woman hear about this?
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Because she had not yet been created when God wagged the divine finger at Adam.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And then additionally, what she says is not what God told Adam in verse 17, because she adds to it, "Nor shall you touch it, or you shall die." God's warning was, "Don't eat it." Now suddenly, you're not even allowed to touch it or you shall die? So, what is the audience to think here? Are we just so unconcerned with narrative congruity and integrity that we don't care? Are we supposed to imagine that Adam was the one who passed on the instructions to Eve, and Adam elaborated on the instructions in an effort to try to make it even extra threatening to Eve? Did God come and talk to Eve about this as well and- Right ... change the commandment? Or did Eve hear it directly from God and then just decide she was going to riff on it herself? We have no idea. And I think that question is kind of critical to how we interpret the story in a way that allows us to answer the questions that we bring to the text.
Dan Beecher Sure.
Dan McClellan Because if you want to ask questions about, how did Eve hear about it? What was the precise threat? Why is Eve being punished the way she's being punished? All these things, we don't have the data to answer those questions. But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So, here's something interesting. The serpent was right.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan What God said would happen didn't happen. What the serpent said would happen, that's what happened.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And as much as people don't like that, as much as people get angry with me for pointing that out, the text itself acknowledges that the serpent was right because in verse 22, "Then the Lord God said, 'See, the humans have become like one of us.'"
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Which is precisely what the serpent said would happen. According to the text, what the serpent said would happen is what happened.
Dan Beecher Right. So the first liar in the book is God, not the serpent.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Whether you want to take the fact that what God said would happen didn't happen to be a lie, to be kind of that parental, "Oh, I don't want to do this to my kid. My boy. Look what they did to my boy." "I'm going to ease up a little bit. I'm just going to make him sweat a lot."
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Whether you want to interpret it like that or you want to interpret it as a lie, what we can say is that the serpent was not the first liar.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Because the serpent's telling the truth. Now, here's another thing. The serpent just says, "You will not die." Does that mean ever?
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Does it mean what God said about dying on the day you eat of it, you won't die that day, but you might get hit by a bus the next day, you might die? Is he saying this will make you immortal? More questions we can't answer with the available data.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And there's a lot.
Dan Beecher We didn't even get to questions like, why did God put that tree there? Just don't put the tree.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, that's the MacGuffin part of it.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan As much as people would like this to be a verbatim transcript of the dialogue that actually historically happened, it's a story that people told- Yeah ... in the middle of the first millennium BCE.
Dan Beecher And I think you're right to call it a fable, too. It has all of the trappings of a fable.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher You and I have talked about this before, and you said this, too. It's unreasonable to think that they thought of this as telling a true story- Yeah ... as opposed to telling a legend of how things started.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Because you can just look at the middle four or five verses of chapter three, and you can imagine that this story is a result of somebody coming to their parent and saying, "Hey, why are women in pain giving birth to children? Why do men have to work so hard to make food? And why do snakes not have legs?"
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan "Well, sit on my knee, young whippersnapper, and let me tell you a tale. It starts off in the day that God made the earth and the heavens." It's just an etiology. It's a folk story that tells you how the world got to be the way it was when the story was told, and when the story was told, the men went out and worked hard to get food. The women had pain in childbirth, and the snakes had no legs.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And even the part that is known as the Protoevangelium, the proto-gospel, in verse 15, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel." That's been held up as this prophecy about Jesus. No, it's not. It's an etiology for why people don't like snakes. It's very basic.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Don't make this into more than what it was.
Dan Beecher Yeah. And also, it's funny because I got into a thing on Threads just yesterday. I got into a little spat, a little argument.
Dan McClellan A row.
Dan Beecher Yeah. Because a guy posted just a thing. What he said was, "Why didn't God ever tell Adam and Eve that Satan was in the garden with them?" So I wrote, "Because Satan wasn't in the garden with them, there was a snake."
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher And then another guy got into this whole thing with me and was just so mad and was like, "No, no, the snake is Satan." And I was like, "Okay, well show me the verse then."
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher And he goes into all of these things and I'm like- Yeah ... "Yeah, but none of that is related to the verse that- Yeah ... we're talking about in Genesis."
Dan McClellan So- Yeah. Probably went to Ezekiel 28 and Revelation 12 and 20, that's the best they got.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And none of that works.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So they didn't even have a concept of Satan as the name of a figure- Right ...
Dan Beecher yet. But- Anyway, we've got to get through this story.
Dan McClellan Yeah. We've got to get through the story. Yeah, we've got to get through the story. So, yada yada yada, and I mentioned the bisque. So the woman saw that the tree was good for food, it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. She took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Now I emphasize who was with her because historically, translations have sometimes left that out- ... for no actual reason. There is no manuscript that lacks it. Why would they leave it out? Unless they don't want to acknowledge that when Eve ate the fruit, Adam was standing right beside her- Yeah ... going, "How does it taste? Does it taste all right?
Dan Beecher Was it nice?" "Hey, you didn't die. I'm going to try some of that."
Dan McClellan Yeah. He was there and if you decide that Adam, and we're later going to see that Paul blames everything on the woman- Mm ... even though it is the sin of Adam that is responsible for bringing death into the world. Paul blames it on the woman. The woman was deceived, not the man. It's like, well, the man was sitting there with his finger up his nose right next to her the entire time. I think that makes some people uncomfortable, and some translators in the past have been like, "Just leave the whole" "He was off tending to the garden.
Dan Beecher He was talking to the orangutan- ... and she just showed up with some fruit and said- Yeah ...
Dan McClellan 'Try this.'" He was like, "Have you seen these lemurs? They're like mini ones of us with big tails."
Dan Beecher Orangutan means- Man of the forest ...
Dan McClellan jungle man.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Yeah, in Malay. So anyway, sorry, that was- There you go.
Dan Beecher All right ...
Dan McClellan that was irrelevant.
Dan Beecher So, one of the things that I did want to mention, just a brief little sort of issue that I had when I was thinking about this earlier today, was just how can God be mad at them for this when he knows they did not yet have a knowledge of good and evil?
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher How can anyone be mad at them? How can it be considered wrong for people who can't have had knowledge of good and evil to have done a thing?
Dan McClellan Yeah. And interestingly, within the LDS tradition, there's a part where Adam is told to do something. He doesn't know why he's supposed to do it, but he says, "I don't know, I was just told to do it." And that's supposed to be held up as the paragon of virtue. You don't ask questions- Right ... you just do what you're told. So there will be people who will be like, "Oh, well, she can follow orders. They can follow orders."
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan "They don't have to know whether it's right or wrong." I said, "Well, deciding to follow orders requires some kind of cognizance of good and bad- Right ...
Dan Beecher right and wrong, so-" You're making a choice there.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And so yeah, that's part of the story that is just inconvenient- ... for the questions that we're bringing to the story. Now, if this is just a folk etiology, it doesn't matter.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Why did God get them in trouble for doing something that they didn't know they weren't really supposed to do, that that would be bad?
Dan Beecher Doesn't matter.
Dan McClellan Doesn't matter. This is why snakes don't have legs- Right ...
Dan Beecher Junior.
Dan McClellan That's the point of the story. That's what you asked me.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Why don't those snakes have legs? It's because of this story.
Dan Beecher Why was Mommy screaming when she had my little sister? Well, I don't know. She ate a fruit one time.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher There's a whole thing.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Mommy's got her own issues to deal with. But if you look at the rhetorical goals of the story, if you try to figure what's the genre here, what are the authors trying to accomplish? If it's a folk etiology, then these questions are irrelevant.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan We're bringing questions to the text that it was never intended to answer, and so we probably shouldn't be asking these questions that were never intended to be a part of the story. If we could resurrect the author of this text and ask him, "Hey, what's going on with this?" I imagine the answer would be, "I wasn't thinking about that because that has nothing to do with why I told this story."
Dan Beecher "Sir, this is a Wendy's."
Dan McClellan Yes, exactly.
Dan Beecher It would be, "Why are you asking the moral implications of Hop On Pop?"
Dan McClellan Yeah. It doesn't matter what Pop's job was.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Yeah. The story is just about getting you to learn to rhyme words.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So yeah, I think all those questions, as critical as they are for so many of the ways that we try to understand the implications of these stories, and maybe there is part of that going on in the background. I'm sure that these authors were a lot more creative than we give them credit for. That doesn't necessarily mean that they were anticipating all the questions that we're bringing to the text.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So some of these things, I think, we're just not intended to ask those questions, much less get answers to them. But that brings up the grand question.
Dan Beecher Yeah, but I'm going to cut you off because- Okay ... the grand question is our second segment.
Dan McClellan Second segment.
Dan Beecher Is it not?
Dan McClellan It is our second segment.
Dan Beecher All right. So- We're going to leave that there with now the snake is crawling on the ground. You can read it for yourself. You can go and find Genesis 3 if you want to learn how- It's free online ... how it all came.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher How it all came to be. But now we're going to move on to the biggest... If asking our questions about how this story is playing out is a mistake, well, wait until we get to Augustine, because things are about to get nutty.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher So let's move on to What Is That? And this week's What Is That? is the grand What Is That? The thing that plagues and haunts us all. The original sin. Now, I'm going to start. I'm going to throw this out.
Dan McClellan Okay.
Dan Beecher The original sin is neither original nor sin.
Dan McClellan Discuss. Now- Talk amongst yourselves.
Dan Beecher Talk amongst yourselves.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher All right. So, let's get into this because, yes, I think we all understand that original sin is attributed to the characters of Adam and Eve, specifically Adam, usually. You mentioned the Mormon tradition, the LDS tradition, which I think it's the second article of their faith, which says, "We believe that men shall be punished for their own sin and not for Adam's transgression." It was a big- Exactly ... bold stand against the concept of original sin.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher So let's, I guess, start with the question of, is original sin in the Bible?
Dan McClellan Well, the concept of original sin obviously isn't. It is something that is triangulated after the Bible is completed by theologians who are... And my argument has long been that the apologists of the second century and on through the early church fathers, their primary goal was to systematize, create a systematic and philosophically satisfying and defensible articulation of the gospel. And so part of that means finding a way to make all these various pieces fit. I've talked a lot about the analogy of the Bible as a toy chest or a box full of Lego bricks- Yeah ... from a variety of different sets, and we just dump that box over, and then we go to work. And so, in my opinion, the grand project of the apologists and the church fathers was try to use as many of the Legos as we can and who can build the best whatever.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And so part of that includes recognizing that we've got this story about Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, and that is the pivot from we don't know the difference between good and evil. We know the difference between good and evil. Humanity is kicked out of paradise. And one of the main themes of so many of the moral and ethical and wisdom stories from this ancient time period was why do we suffer? Why are we mortal? Why do bad things happen? And there are a lot of different answers to this question, but you can look in Gilgamesh, you can look in Adapa, you can look in all kinds of different myths, and that's just a central lament of humanity, the human condition in this time period. So, the Garden of Eden seems like it is the Bible's way of accounting for that and where bad things come from. However, it's not the only player. It's not the only option. It's not the only kid on the block.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan We also have First Enoch and the Enochic tradition, which tries to use the story from Genesis 6, where the angels, in the Hellenistic reading, these are angels. In Genesis 6, they're gods.
Dan Beecher Oh, right.
Dan McClellan They come down, and they have children with human women, and in the Enochic tradition, they also teach humanity how to do all the bad stuff, like eye shadow. Which is literally on the list if you- Shameful ... read the book of First Enoch.
Dan Beecher Yeah. Just so shameful.
Dan McClellan But weapons of war and all of this kind of stuff- Okay ... are all taught by the angels to humanity. And this is kind of an alternative theory of the origin of sin. And it is phenomenally popular, phenomenally influential, and an awful lot of the New Testament is based on the traditions from the Enochic narratives, whether it's found in First Enoch or places like Jubilees, the Book of Giants, all this kind of stuff. So, you have a competition, kind of, between the story of Adam and Eve and the story of the fallen angels as the introduction of evil into the world. And for folks like Paul, Adam and Eve seems to win out. But one of the interesting things about the entire rest of the Hebrew Bible is the story of Adam and Eve never comes up ever again. Nobody ever talks about it.
Dan Beecher Which is crazy. No way.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher It seems like they told the origin story, the two people, and then they're like, "Okay, done."
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher That's- Because it referenced back to Abraham, and there are references back to lots of different characters.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher But just not those guys.
Dan McClellan Yeah. It's the kind of story where the kid's like, "Well, that's a dumb story for why snakes don't have legs."
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And the parent's like, "Yeah, what are you going to do?" And they go on- Sure ... and that story does not become An incredibly popular story. You have a mention of Eden in Ezekiel 28, and the story is entirely different.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Because there's some guardian cherub that is in Eden that's supposed to be the Adam, the human. There are precious stones everywhere. It's a mountain.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan None of that is in Genesis 2 and 3.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And then you have a genealogy in Genesis 5, and then in 1 Chronicles, where it mentions Adam.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan That's it. There's no other telling of the story of the Garden of Eden. And then we get to Paul and Romans 5. Romans 5:12-21 has this kind of meditation on the significance of sin. And Paul says, "As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law." And this seems to be suggesting that there was no death in the world until Adam and Eve's transgression. And he blames it on the man.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Because of one man, sin entered the world. He ignores Eve, and I think probably because he's trying to draw this parallel. By one man, sin entered the world. By one man, sin is resolved.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Jesus is the second man. And so you want it to be nice and symmetrical.
Dan Beecher I guess so.
Dan McClellan So you say, "Yeah, this is one dude." Or you can do what the person who was pretending to be Paul in 1 Timothy 2:14 did, where you can say, "Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor."
Dan Beecher So- Yeah, it does seem like that is a retrojection of an ideology back in, like trying to make Paul a little bit more misogynistic than even Paul was willing to be.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Or than it occurred to Paul to be.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And as misogynistic as Paul could get- Yeah ... the authors of Ephesians and 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, whether they were one author or different authors, they are incredibly more misogynistic.
Dan Beecher But- Well, although I will say this, Paul in Romans 5, it's a form of misogyny to be like, "The woman couldn't have done a thing."
Dan McClellan Yeah. We're just going to ignore the woman.
Dan Beecher There's no way what she did could've affected all of humanity. But homeboy over there, he definitely- Yeah ... rocked the world- Yeah ...
Dan McClellan with that.
Dan Beecher With that.
Dan McClellan And for that reason, women shouldn't have credit cards and shouldn't be able to take out a mortgage- Right ... until the 1970s through '90s.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So, yeah. Yeah, it's problematic. And so we have this idea here, presented by Paul, that the story of Adam and Eve is what brings sin into the world. And then we've got this other passage in Psalms, Psalm 51, I believe it's verse 5. I'm just going to pull it up in yon Hebrew here. So, the NRSVUE says, "Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me." The KJV says, "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." And the Hebrew is, yeah, "Behold, in iniquity I travailed," or I writhe. That probably just means I was born.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan "And in chet," which comes from hata, "my mother conceived me." And so if we look at these three passages, if we look at the story of the Garden of Eden, if we look at this notion that I was conceived in sin, and was born in iniquity, and we look at Paul's idea that because of the transgression of Adam, sin entered the world, we get this idea that humanity is sinful, not just from birth, but from conception.
Dan Beecher Just straight out the chute.
Dan McClellan It's- Yeah. Even before you come out the chute. When you're still on the other side of the chute, when you're cooking.
Dan Beecher That's sinful, sinful sperm.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher That's the problem, I think.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan They didn't know what they looked like back then, so I'll save that joke for another day.
Dan Beecher The homunculus that the man is- ... depositing into the- Yes ... woman is already sinful.
Dan McClellan And so it's really a result of putting together the Lego bricks in a way that is philosophically defensible and satisfying and sophisticated. And we get this idea that this sin is passed on from parents to children, and it is something that we all inherit. And it's a way to account for the sinful nature of all humans without having to say that at some point along the way, every single human being is corrupted by something.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan It's a way to say that's the seed, and then it sprouts in all humans, so everybody gets this original sin passed on to them.
Dan Beecher When did this idea sort of coalesce into, you mentioned these multiple different sort of- ... concepts that were then triangulated to come up with this original sin idea. Do we know when that happened?
Dan McClellan So, we have this idea in the middle of the second century CE with Justin Martyr. We have this idea that Adam and Eve's sin brought death into the world. And we get from Paul the notion that the wages of sin is death. In other words, everybody who is mortal is sinful. And so there's this idea that we all have some kind of sin that we inherit as a result of being human. I think Tertullian, toward the end of the second century, is one of the first ones to suggest that we inherit sin from parents, but it's not until Augustine, around the end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth century CE, that we get the phrase original sin.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Not in English, obviously. But I think Augustine is the first one to actually name this idea, and then the doctrine has to be developed from there because you have these ideas of how is it passed along? Is it passed along from the mother, from the father? Do they both contribute?
Dan Beecher Is it physical?
Dan McClellan Is it spiritual? How is it getting from the parent to the child, and what exactly is the nature of the sin? And something that we get to in the Reformation is does baptism absolve us of original sin? Does it make it go away, or is this something that we always have with us? Because if the wages of sin is death, then baptism, if it got rid of original sin, would make us all immortal.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And to my knowledge, it does not.
Dan Beecher So- Not that I've ever seen.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And in all of this, we're just chasing down the implications of the result of previous chasing down of implications from the result of previous. It's a never-ending cascade of we answered questions that don't really have answers in the scriptures that we think have all the answers, and so now we have to deal with the fallout of the answers that we came up with.
Dan Beecher Maybe I need to ask a question that has always, it just occurred to me that we need to talk about what the heck sin actually is.
Dan McClellan Oh, gosh.
Dan Beecher If we're going to talk about the original sin- Yeah ... and if we're going to talk about- ... human nature being somehow sinful or whatever- Yeah ...
Dan McClellan what is sin?
Dan Beecher What are we even talking about? Because I think we all feel like we have a floating sort of nebulous concept of it. It's when you do something bad, but a baby can't have done something bad yet. So it's got to be bigger than that. But also, just what is it?
Dan McClellan So, here's where I'm going to say something that is going to annoy an awful lot of people. You can define sin about as well as you can define, what, six, seven things.
Dan Beecher Oh.
Dan McClellan It's 100% vibes.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Sin is whatever somebody says it is. And this goes back to my concern with just attempts to define conceptual categories. Sin is an abstraction, and as an abstraction that is not reducible to anything observable, to anything testable, it can be whatever people want it to be.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And so we can look at it etymologically, and I even got on Rainn Wilson- Wilson ... is that his name? Yeah, I got on Rainn Wilson's case because on his podcast, he was like, "It's an archery term. It means to miss the mark." And it's like, okay, the word is an archery term, but it was not used, you didn't say that because you were talking about missing the mark all the time. That's the etymological fallacy. So that's not helpful. But we can look at, like in Hebrew, hata is the word, and this has to do with some kind of, in a religious sense, and I don't like using the word religious for the ancient world, but it is certain behaviors that are religiously disqualified.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan And ultimately, I think it's got to be rooted in ritual because a lot of the language that we see for sin, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, but even when we get into the New Testament, has to do with uncleanness- Mm ... with contamination, with things that make you impure. And that usually has reference to a kind of binary notion of you are qualified or authorized to engage in certain cultic activity, or you are prohibited from doing it. So that usually has to do with some kind of concept of purity. And so, in the Hebrew Bible, you see an awful lot of discussion where sin generates kind of a metaphysical contamination that gets on the temple. And so, a lot of the purification rites that are described in Leviticus and elsewhere have nothing to do with cleansing the people.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan It has to do with cleansing, conceptually, the sacred space because we've done this thing and suddenly, splurt, there's a bunch of metaphysical contaminant on the wall of the temple- Right ... and we've got to do the stuff to scrub it off. So- It seems to originate in the notion that there are behaviors that make us unclean or impure when it comes to religious activity. And then that then kind of expands to include behaviors that are considered wrong, whether it's about offending other people or offending God or hurting other people or doing things that are considered social no-nos. So, it is very ambiguous, but we've got these words.
Dan Beecher It is interesting that that word sin isn't always... Because in my mind, I associate it almost exclusively with sort of morality.
Dan McClellan Uh-huh.
Dan Beecher With a commission of an act that could be considered immoral or is somehow against morality. But it's interesting that that word doesn't have to have anything to do with morality.
Dan McClellan No. And I think because there's a deity that is dictating what is and is not sinful in the Bible, divine command ethics would suggest that it's entirely arbitrary. Sin is whatever God says sin is.
Dan Beecher Right. And God can change their mind whenever they want, because if God- And it doesn't have to be anchored in anything that we would consider morality.
Dan McClellan Right. In fact, a lot of- It's assumed to eat shellfish, and that's that.
Dan Beecher The act.
Dan McClellan Yeah. But that's not philosophically satisfying, so when we look in the legend of Aristeas, which is supposed to be about how the Septuagint came to be, at night, the 72 scholars would dine, and they would have these symposia with the leaders of Egypt, and they would wax philosophic on how it's all systematic, and the shellfish have all these things in common, and those things are metaphorically like this immoral thing.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And so we abstain from eating those things in order to perform this refusal to engage in that immoral behavior. So, you've always got people trying to explain why, which brings us back to the Garden of Eden story. We got questions that we're bringing to the text, and we need answers, even if the author would've been like, "Pfft. That's a dumb question."
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan "That has nothing to do with my story." But yeah, I think you get a slow kind of generalizing, where initially it has to do with your ability to participate in ritual, but then it spreads out to become about morality and about right and wrong as you get more systematic development of what it means for things to be right and wrong. And so the New Testament, I think, is heavily influenced by Greek thinking on what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong. And by the time you get to the folks who are writing the pastoral epistles, you're waxing philosophic on Aristotle's notion of the household, where you've got the paterfamilias, you've got the wife, you've got the children, you've got the enslaved folks. Those are the four things. And to be a good household is to have all those things in order and all the members of each of those different classes fulfilling their duties in their specific classes. And anything outside of that becomes sin. So, I don't think you can define it. It's kind of like the idea of the atonement.
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan Everybody's got different models for the atonement. And there's no paper that you can rub on your atonement theory that'll turn pink and you can be like, "Ah, I got it. This is the right one." There's no acid you can dip it into and be like, "If it turns purple, that means we got the right one." It doesn't work like that because these are conceptual categories that literally are whatever people agree they are. So, yeah, that's not a satisfying answer.
Dan Beecher What is sin?
Dan McClellan Whatever you want, man. Whatever you want.
Dan Beecher I mean, I'm pretty sure it's bad.
Dan McClellan Yeah, but when we look in the Bible, you know what is not sin?
Dan Beecher Slavery.
Dan McClellan Right.
Dan Beecher Yeah. Plenty of things are never labeled sin that we would find horrific.
Dan McClellan Polygamy.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan We had a whole episode on polygamy recently.
Dan Beecher Yeah, we did.
Dan McClellan And then every now and then, you'll get a group come along and be like, "Well, we kind of like that."
Dan Beecher We would. We want to try that.
Dan McClellan "We don't have a problem with that."
Dan Beecher Yeah. And then the rest of the country or the rest of the world goes, "Uh, no."
Dan McClellan Denied.
Dan Beecher Incorrect.
Dan McClellan Stairway denied. So yeah, it's really about consensus. And now we've got folks, we've got our Joel Webbons and other juvenile minds trapped in adult bodies that are like, "Well, women shouldn't be voting.
Dan Beecher That's sinful."
Dan McClellan By whose reckoning?
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan It's really just about who you can get to agree with you. So, when it comes to original sin and what sin is, when we get to the New Testament, hamartia, it's based on the idea of unclean or impure, unrighteous. It's missing a virtue or missing the desired goal because of weakness, accident, or whatever. So, it's going to be different depending on the author. It's not reducible to a short list of necessary and sufficient features. And the discussion that would need to be had to review all the different things that sin can be, I think would infuriate both of us and take- Right ... too many episodes.
Dan Beecher Well, there you go.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Well, I think what's nice about this conversation is that we have gotten rid of the need to have a full episode about sin. But what we haven't done, I think, is gotten all the way through the discussion of original sin.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Because I guess one of the things that I wanted to know is what problem are we solving when we decide that original sin is necessary? I get that we're trying to solve for why when it comes to Romans 5 and- Yeah ... and stuff. But it just seems like in the Pelagius style, why can't humans be born morally neutral, and just sin being a choice- Yeah ... rather than it being human nature?
Dan McClellan And there are going to be folks in the audience who have a lot more training in moral philosophy who- Well, and yeah, this is theology, and that's not either of our wheelhouse, really Yeah. And I know of some folks we could probably get on the show to get a better answer than what I would give. But what I would say is that in this time period, the nature of sin was considered no different from the nature of blood for people in the Enlightenment who are cutting open cadavers that they stole from the cemetery. This is just something we have to search this out and we have to figure out what this is because it's very real and we don't even know all the implications of the answers that we develop for these questions. So, I think that folks like Augustine and others were just trying to find the truth of what this was and how to think about it because they considered this something as real as your humors that are inside your body and- Yeah ...
Dan Beecher yeah. And- And you walk around and suddenly- ...
Dan McClellan essential oils and homoeopathy and- ...
Dan Beecher suddenly you have sexual desire and you're just like, "Why do I have this?
Dan McClellan Ah."
Dan Beecher Yes.
Dan McClellan And it has a lot of implications for how we decide what's right and wrong. These were debates that were going on among the most important philosophers of the ancient world who remain some of the most important thinkers about right and wrong.
Dan Beecher This discussion is still happening, right?
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher It is a perpetual discussion to some extent.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Is it okay to like the Raiders?
Dan Beecher Of course not.
Dan McClellan Of course not. But there are people who, for whatever reason, are born with this inclination, concupiscence you can call it if you want, a hurtful desire. But yeah, for whatever reason, there are Raiders fans out there. But it's the perennial question: Why do people like the Raiders?
Dan Beecher There you go.
Dan McClellan Yeah. There's no answer.
Dan Beecher There is no answer.
Dan McClellan All right. Well, once again- I'm going to get a bunch of comments on that. As soon as I post this on Twitter, I'm going to get a bunch of- They're not even in Oakland anymore, man.
Dan Beecher Come on. No, they're in- Surely they're okay now ...
Dan McClellan they're in Vegas enjoying the zero Michelin star restaurants- Yeah.
Dan Beecher ...
Dan McClellan for who knows how much longer.
Dan Beecher Yeah. That's a reference to a conversation Dan and I had before we started recording. So, there you go.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher Well, I think that we have managed to not get to anything. We've talked for an hour. We've circled the question a lot.
Dan McClellan We've talked- Yeah.
Dan Beecher Boy, did we talk about some stuff. But I don't know if we got to anything, but I still liked it. If you would like to have an original sin, go out and have one. I think sinning in an original way is a- I had two yesterday ... it's a fun challenge- It was wonderful ... is what I think. So go and enjoy some original sin. If you would like to commit the sin of helping this podcast- Of encouraging us.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Yeah. Then I encourage you to go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, sign up, get access to an early and ad free version of the show, get access to the after party, the additional content that we make every week, and also be one of our favorite people. So, that's always a great thing to do. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and we'll talk to you again next week.
Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.
