But notice further on how impotent this so-called almighty deity really was. He exclaimed in fear, “Behold, the man is become as one of us [which was precisely what the devil predicted] to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and live for ever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden.” Now how easy it would have been for an omnipotent creator to have annihilated his own work, and thus cleared the way for a fresh start. It would be interesting to know who the “we” were that the writer refers to, if not an androgynous deity or a multitude of gods or goddesses. What was the consequence of this sin of Adam and Eve? Every man and every woman ever born upon this earth is guilty of this sin, and will eternally burn in hell fire, says the Christian church, unless they believe that this circumvented god became a man, lived on this earth, and died the death of a criminal, in order to give satisfaction to himself for the outrage committed on his divine majesty by three of his creatures. The countless myriads of human beings who have inhabited this earth during the six thousand years (according to Bible chronology) that the world has existed, are all and each under this fearful curse, although they had no more to do with Adam’s sin than the man in the moon, and had no power to prevent it. These people have been brought into the world, whether they liked it or not, and are subject to this penalty, the enormous majority of them being inevitably doomed to eternal torment; for there have lived many millions of people who never even heard of the Bible, its gods or its scheme of redemption. We may go farther and declare that all are inevitably doomed, for we cannot conceive that anyone can believe such a story as that of the fall. No one will venture to assert that infants and idiots can believe anything, therefore there is no hope for these unfortunates, whatever chances there may be for others. As the expression of the infantile imagination of primitive man, after emerging from his brute ancestry, and commencing to exercise more fully his reasoning faculties, these fables are easily understood; but as the writings of men who had been inspired by the almighty power to record a true account of the origin of nature and man for the use of others, they must be at once rejected by all reasonable and thoughtful people as gross absurdities. We can easily understand how the mind of primitive man pondered over the strange mixture of good and evil in the world, just as the awakening mind of a child would do to day; how the mystery would be explained by the analogy of the celestial movements; and how, as the result of the infantile reasoning, the good principle became associated with the mental conception of a venerable old gentleman, who planted a garden, and performed the principle part in the drama just described from the third chapter of Genesis.