Not Original, Not Sin

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Dan McClellan (0:59)

So here's where I'm gonna 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. It's a hundred percent vibes.

Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:20)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:21)

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 (1:33)

Oh man, I'm feeling sinful. Just absolutely sinful.

Dan McClellan (1:38)

That's kind of your baseline, isn't it? That's just norm.

Dan Beecher (1:41)

That's like standard. But like also feels like it was just born there. You know what I mean?

Dan McClellan (1:47)

Oh, oh, OK.

Dan Beecher (1:50)

Yeah, that's me tipping off what we're going to be talking about, I guess. I'm very subtle. I don't know if you guys know that about me, but that's yeah.

Dan McClellan (1:57)

That's also your baseline subtlety.

Dan Beecher (1:59)

Subtlety is it's it's one of the great markers of my character. It's true. So today we're going to be talking first. First, we're going to do a chapter and verse, and we're going to talk about the Garden of Eden, and we're going to talk about Adam and Eve specifically. We've talked a lot about Genesis one, two, little three, little four. We're mostly doing two into three now. We're going to get that creation, not the creation story, the fall.

Dan McClellan (2:30)

Yes, the fall. We're going to talk about some of the peculiarities of this story as well. Things that, 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, you know, they can turn invisible and all this kind of stuff.

Dan Beecher (2:53)

Yeah, sure, why not?

Dan McClellan (2:55)

Asexual reproduction, it's, or not asexual, what do you call it? Yeah, I don't know. A-biogenesis, let's call it that.

Dan Beecher (3:02)

Yeah, absolutely.

Dan McClellan (3:03)

As a result of that rare species of frog DNA getting...

Dan Beecher (3:07)

If anybody should have something to do with A-biogenesis, it's Adam and Eve.

Dan McClellan (3:11)

You would think.

Dan Beecher (3:12)

I would, so I think that's great.

Dan McClellan (3:15)

My high school daughter is reading Jurassic Park right now in her class, and so we got her some, 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 (3:28)

They made a book of that? That's interesting.

Dan McClellan (3:30)

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, and then watch some of the movies they made of those things, which were not nearly as good.

Dan Beecher (3:45)

Yeah, well, Spielberg tends to make a fine movie. Anyway, 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. Yeah. So that'll be exciting and fun and weird.

Dan McClellan (4:03)

So right now, yeah.

Dan Beecher (4:04)

Everything about the Bible is weird to me. So let's dive in with chapter and verse. All right. You said you wanted to start in chapter two. Now, most of chapter two is, oh, is Adam sitting around in a garden all by himself and God trying to make him less bored.