Episode III: Free Will (Ain't Free)

The justice of kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden is one of the many things that you can't look at too closely unless you're perfectly comfortable with the "Sometimes God is just a dick" thesis - one which the Greeks would have been pretty fine with, but which doesn't sit as well with the Practically Perfect In Every Way school of god creation. The usual Out here is that Jehovah gave Adam free will, so the transgression wasn't predetermined, and so you can't fault Jehovah for the punishment.

This is not convincing to me. Either Adam and Eve acted as they did for a reason, or they did not. If it was for a reason, it was either for an internal one, or an external one, or both. But Jehovah, having created them and the place they were, and everything in it, including the snake, was the source of the internal and external conditions that led to the transgression, and therefore was himself the reason for the transgression, in which case he should be punishing himself for having set things up in such a fucking stupid way, not Adam and Eve for following the impulses that had been forced upon them (was it Eve's fault that she was gullible and greedy - or the person who MADE HER BRAIN WITH HIS HANDS!!?) within the environment which was also forced upon them.

If, on the other hand, Adam and Eve weren't acting for a reason which can be traced back to Jehovah's brilliant layout for the Garden ("Let's see... tree of knowledge here... the way treacherous snake can live right next to it... and I'll put my two most morbidly naive and entirely innocent creations EXACTLY NEXT TO THOSE! That should work out just fine, just fine...time to god hump Saturn..."), if their actions were entirely random manifestations, then Jehovah is just being arbitrary - he's shooting the lottery machine because it didn't come up with his number - this isn't atypical behavior for him, but it's hardly a good model for justice and goodness.

Oh, the Latin here... I had debated in the beginning whether I should include translations in the panels themselves, in this chatter, or not at all. We're opting for the middle road here, so this is (I hope) the English translation of the above:

Hippolyta: Do you know where the garden is?
Vocate: I barely know his god's name - who knows what his horticultural habits are?
Hippolyta: So we send him away?
Vocate: A job's a job (Literally: Money is money)

And later:

Vocate: Hippolyta, come, we need to hire a god.

- Count Dolby von Luckner