I’ve believed for many years now that the story of Adam and Eve being ‘cast out’ from the Garden of Eden likely happened because they procreated, but the biblical stories only imply this at best; “imply” might even be to strong of a word to use. To make this leap required connecting a dot that doesn’t seem to be explicitly connected in the King James biblical translation. The primary ‘missing dot’ I saw is that the stories subsequent to the expulsion include their children, Cain and Able.

SA is the first other person whose thoughts I’ve read that confirms this belief of mine. It also brings to my mind, first and foremost, that being ‘cast out’ from Eden was simply a metaphorical reference to a population boom, which, as some of us may understand, is quite out-of-control in our current earthly civilization. Weren’t there other biblical stories of occasional famines?

Population booms and famines are a complementary historical cycle of earthly life, one not confined solely to humans. The first act leading to a population bubble, like sets of falling dominos, sets in motion serieses of causes and effects, culminating in an eventual extinction, often due to the food supply becoming scarce, but not necessarily limited only to extinction by famine. For the deeply devout, eschatology becomes the point of focus of this natural cause and effect.

Being ‘cast out’ of Eden, when understood literally, means something else entirely than what the missing-dot message delineated above suggests, bringing to mind thoughts of “punishment” when restricted to this singular story concept. As a lesson taught to a potentially procreative couple in the distant past by an omnipotent, the literal interpretation of punishment and resulting guilt for failure to obey is quite strong among some believers.

Some people that I’ve discussed this story with suggested that Eve’s eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge at the urging of the serpent is a metaphor within a metaphor, instigated by yet another metaphor. This tends to result in an obfuscated original-intent meaning, open to many interpretations. Are any ‘missing dots’ explicitly connected in other religious or surviving historical texts regarding any procreative reason for the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve?

Regardless, what we appear to have ended up with for a number of millennia is a cycle of hierarchical command and control punishments, for all but the luckiest, meted out generously by humans in various societal hierarchies. Punishments are even executed when other people’s non-harmful-to-another behaviors are not to their liking.

When one is punished, that lesson ultimately teaches how to punish.

1. Neo-Pagan (100%)
2. Mahayana Buddhism (95%)
3. Unitarian Universalism (91%)
4. New Age (90%)
5. Liberal Quakers (79%)
6. New Thought (78%)
7. Scientology (78%)
8. Taoism (70%)
9. Reform Judaism (68%)
10. Hinduism (67%)
11. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (64%)
12. Theravada Buddhism (64%)
13. Jainism (60%)
14. Secular Humanism (60%)
15. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (59%)
16. Bahá’í Faith (57%)
17. Sikhism (55%)
18. Orthodox Quaker (47%)
19. Orthodox Judaism (44%)
20. Islam (36%)
21. Nontheist (32%)
22. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (23%)
23. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (18%)
24. Seventh Day Adventist (14%)
25. Eastern Orthodox (13%)
26. Roman Catholic (13%)
27. Jehovah’s Witness (7%)

I guess I’m a NeoPagan. So I should know what a NeoPagan is, right? Well, logic says so, but I must admit I’m confused. In the results above, Christian beliefs are populated more densely at the end of the list, indicating they’re not likely a synchronous belief match for me.

“What’s a NeoPagan?” There appears to be great diversity of opinion, fact, and even scorn regarding neopaganism. The article Pagan Perplexity explores the word’s etymology, and places its evolutionary meanings in some historical context. The Wikipedia.org entry for “neopaganism” is not to be ignored. There are a lot of different beliefs listed there under this one umbrella term, including monotheism, and it’s clear that many of these beliefs are exclusive of each other. That causes some mental pause when contrasting it with any single major religion of the last millennia or two.

Am I a solitary NeoPagan? Before taking this quiz, I had no idea that was my religious classification. Were the tested-for beliefs acquired as a result of environment? Are there past issues of others’ deliberate interventions of indoctrination? Or were these beliefs inborn?

Since I was sent to multiple private schools when I was young, and they all had chapel or ‘non-denominational’ Christian religious services as mandatory, I tend to think some of my beliefs are, to one degree or another, acquired. These particular schools always taught me, in the end, that the correct way to approach ‘life’ is to ‘cast away’ in permanence. These experiences were in no way lessons of ‘how to be successful’ in life, and by applied practice, in action.

Therefore my beliefs are likely not only acquired, they are academically learned. There are many things in each of our respective lives that we cannot ‘cast away’ from.

If I’m a NeoPagan, like Belief-O-Matic says, I’m definitely a solitary one.