Why Eve took the fall
Scott Berkun’s book Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Managment has an unusual index entry: bullshit, detecting, 268. He expanded on the topic elsewhere:
The first rule of BS is to expect it. Fire detectors are designed to expect a fire at any moment: they’re not optimists. They fixate on the possibility of fires and that’s why they save lives. If you want to detect BS you have to swallow some cynicism, and add some internal doubt to everything you hear.
Common sense, right? Well, it ain’t that common. Anyway, as to how Eve got that bum rap:
To recap from the book of Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve not to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, as pretty as it is, for they’ll die. He wanders off to do some unexplained godlike things, as gods are prone to do, leaving the very tempting, and non pit-bull or electrified fence protected, tree out for all to see. Meanwhile Satan slinks by and convinces Eve apples are good: so she and Adam have an apple snack. God instantly returns, scolds Adam, who blames Eve; resulting in everyone, snakes, people and all, getting thrown out of Eden forever.
Please note that in this tale nearly everyone lied. God lied, or was deceptively ambiguous, about the apples (they weren’t fatal), Satan misrepresents the apple’s power, and Adam, approximates a lie in his wimpy finger pointing to Eve. It’s a litany of deception and a cautionary tale: in any book that makes everyone look bad in just a few pages, is it really a surprise how the rest plays out?
It’s a lovely essay. Read the whole thing.
via Lifehacker
