Man's creation of a false paradise

At first, there were only Adam and God. Their
meeting place was the Garden, where there were
trees and flowers of every variety; beasts of land, sea, and sky; lakes and rivers, mountains and valleys; day and night, dawn and dusk, sunrise and sunset. Adam's world was as strange and beautiful as our own. He spent his days in study, contemplating the omnipotent being who had created him, the alien consciousness that had given birth to this plentitude. His nights he spent dreaming of fulfillment, of some day coming to understand this world that was not his own. But he could not remain only a seeker of the spiritual for long. Other, more immediate pleasures, awaited him, to tempt him away from the ongoing search for meaning.

One day, Adam abandoned this difficult task of contemplation. It was too overwhelming, perhaps. God was too mysterious, too high, too magnificent. He would not give Himself and His secrets too freely to the impatient seeker. So Adam requested Eve. He was lonely, and the other beasts had partners. These were the rationalizations, the excuses. Of course, the other beasts had partners, but they were beasts, and he was Man. He was made for God. What he wanted was not reprieve from loneliness but escape from himself, his condition, his human failings. He was not fit for the difficult task of knowing God. It was easier to ignore his incapacity through thoughts of fleshy pleasure than to work toward the great goal to which he had been assigned. Knowing Eve was easier than knowing God. In that moment, homosexuality--the human lust for other human beings--was born into the world.

John Milton claims that God was happy with Adam's request and pleased to grant it. But Milton is mistaken. God, with His foreknowledge, had merely resigned Himself to the certainty of this plea, just as He had resigned himself to the fact of the Fall. So God gave Adam his Eve. And Adam gazed upon her and was pleased.

The search for meaning, for knowledge, for the divine, all began to wane in Adam's consciousness. Eve usurped the place they had once occupied. She became Adam's God, as Milton implies. The Fall followed. God had planned the whole affair carefully; the Tree of Knowledge was a clever trick. Knowledge, after all, had always existed in the world. Adam was created to aspire, to attain knowledge of God and God's world. Back before the Fall, it had all been voluntary. Adam had had free will. Now, the fields would have to be tilled, disease fought, disaster averted, life prolonged, existence made meaningful. All of these things would require study, science, art, mythology, poetry. God would force knowledge onto Man. And so it came to pass.

We all know the myth, although we are eager to interpret it incorrectly. Satan, good and evil, obedience--such things are peripheral, emphasized by generations of shallow moralists. The myth is, and always was, about a conflict between God and Eve for the soul of Man. Now, centuries of work have brought us to a peculiar state. In today's society only a small segment of the population is obliged to come in contact with the divine, to aspire to know the world in which we live: the scientists, the artists, the philosophers, a few inquisitive others. The rest merely bask in the complacency of being. They allow habit and convention to shuttle them along until they die. A few days before, perhaps, they will think for an hour or two: Is there a God? Yes. Certainly, yes. There must be. Otherwise...well, there is no otherwise...

The producers and the reproducers: each one of us belongs, more or less, to one of these two categories. Adam chose the latter. He chose reproduction, homosexuality. For homosexuality is not only a man's desire for a man; it is also Man's desire for Man. Heterosexuality, its opposite, is Man's desire for God; not god the literal deity, but God the divine, the spiritual, the other. It is Man's desire to know his world, where his human companion, if he should choose one, is only a single part of that world, another wonderful animal among many. When Man becomes a reproducer, when he turns to Eve, or a same-sex companion, he gives himself over. But despite all of his grand mythology of love, he is in fact giving himself not to love, but to sex: not to the mystical, but to a mysticism born out of a need to satisfy an animal craving, a hormonal imbalance that he cannot see as the root of his unhappiness.

But Man will see soon enough. There is no alternative; the poetry of love is all but antiquated, the myths are falling away one by one. It is a question of sex or the search for meaning, and every cow is capable of the former. The latter, however--in time, it will lead Man back to the Garden.

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