We are nonplussed. Why did the Almighty make this strict prohibition? Did he enjoy this kindergarten for the first people on earth? Could God share the human happiness which Adam and Eve experienced in the Garden of Eden, since he, the sublime, stood high above mankind? Why did he want to keep

'knowledge' from his first-created children?

Theologians have an answer. God wanted to 'bestow love' on them and wished that they should both

'partake' of his kingdom. For heavens' sake! According to that interpretation. God is supposed to have yearned for love ... and to have felt lonely. In my opinion, those are not feelings that befit God, for he of all people is boundlessly happy in his omnipotence. An intermediate condition - 'A little love might be nice' or 'It's boring, playmates wouldn't be a bad idea' - does not exist for an exclusive God. So what was he trying to achieve with his humans in Paradise?

Again, theologians have the answer pat. God wanted to lead Adam and Eve into temptation, he wanted to test them. That doesn't wash, reverend gentlemen. What kind of low opinion have they of God?

'Temptation and 'testing' would be mere cardsharper's tricks, since he, the omniscient, must have known the results of the temptation beforehand. Now suppose we play with the idea that they did not, having free will, eat the apple. What would have happened if they had not recognized their shameful nakedness - and with it the possibility of procreation? Would God have had to create more and more human beings - on the assembly-line system? People, who, thanks to their free will, would not have striven for 'knowledge', because they obediently observed God's ban? God obviously had the 'Fall' in his calculations, because he was omniscient. Otherwise many countries in the world would not be bursting at the seams with overpopulation today.

Adam and Eve did not pluck the apple from the bough casually. There was a tempter. the devil or snake. But every created thing conies from God. At least, that's what we've learnt. So that logically the devil (or snake) is also a product of God. Was our benevolent God so infamous as to create a devil or snake in order to deceive two innocents? And why is God so shocked after the vegetarian meal to find that from then on sin is ineradicable in his world? HE knew in advance exactly what would happen.

Theologists tug at my sleeve. It wasn't like that! Lucifer, the devil, they say, was a renegade in God's kingdom. A renegade in the kingdom of heaven? If the 'kingdom of heaven' equals bliss (as we are promised), there cannot be any opposition, rebels or renegades in it. Either - or. If God's kingdom guarantees the state of perfect happiness, Lucifer, would certainly not have had the idea of disobeying God. However, if absolute happiness did not exist there, it was because God was not almighty .enough to create such a state. Here, too, there is a weak point in the theologians' argument. They are unable either to dismiss the struggle between God and Lucifer or to motivate it logically. Before Lucifer approached the inhabitants of Paradise to tempt them, God must have known that his devilishness would succeed. And the business of Adam and Eve's 'free will' remains a kind of deus ex machina.

Even with the interpolation of Lucifer, the snake, Adam and Eve acted at the will and behest of almighty God.

To a man who takes the word that was taught him at its face value, the situation presents itself as follows. God did not live in a perfect heaven, for there was an opposition in it, Lucifer set to work in Paradise and egged on Adam and Eve to commit a sin which God knew was about to happen. Then the apple was eaten. Then came the crowning episode: (omniscient) God was so offended that, beside himself with wrath, he cursed the innocent descendants of the first married couple for all eternity and branded the stain of 'original sin' on to the family tree as a ghastly heritage. Everyone born since then carries 'original sin' with him from the cradle.

How can miserable mankind be freed of this burden? Only by a redeemer. The Bible says: 'God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son ...'

Not being overcritical, people accepted this son who had cropped up so suddenly, although it is difficult to conceive of the one and only God with a family. This son is to be envied, since he has a

'heavenly' father, full of love, goodness and solicitude. That is what one would think, but it is not the case. .He is handed over to mankind (suffering under the burden of original sin), so that he can free his brother and sisters from their burden. The son of God has to be nailed to the Cross and bled to death in agony. After the death of his 'only begotten son' God is appeased again! Surely this ghastly story contains ideas from barbaric pagan cults? This dogma of redemption seems to me to be a kind of throwback to primitive religions which forced their servants to propitiate their wrathful Gods with blood sacrifices.

The crucifixion, theologians assure us, is only to be under-stood symbolically. Why is this not made quite clear in religious teaching? My daughter Lela learns - like all previous generations - that Jesus was the only begotten son of God made flesh, that he suffered every pain (= the oppressing original sins) as a man. That he died as a man, struggled as a man, with all the attendant torments and miseries.

But how can God, who knowingly let his own son be tortured - because Adam and Eve committed a sin that he could easily have prevented through his fore-knowledge - be reconciled by Christ's death with the very men who killed him? (With this macabre end to the story original sin should really have been banished from the world. But it is still about.)

Theologians, full of ideas and skilled in dialectics, recently sought a path which would lead out of this dilemma, but it terminated in a dead end.

They now say that God the Father did not so love the world that he sacrificed his only begotten son, but that Jesus sacrificed himself of his own 'free will' out of love of mankind. Unfortunately this aboutturn does not produce any significant conclusion.

God the Father and God the Son are unalloyed and inseparable, according to Christian dogma (the Nicene and Chal-cedonian creeds). So it makes no difference what one or the other does. Either way the sacrifice remains senseless. Father and Son were (and are) 'one' from the beginning according to current doctrine. Hence both of them knew what was going to happen at any given moment. As this does not resolve the contradiction, the ecclesiastical teachers thought up an - absolutely final? - interpretation. Jesus wanted to show mankind how they should live in order to please God the Father.

Does that bring us back to the beginning again, to zero? If the whole of mankind is supposed to become 'pleasing to God', then the Almighty would simply have had to plan that our ancestors Adam and Eve should become so, according to his divine will. That would have been quite within his powers, wouldn't it?

Surely the dogmas of original sin and redemption lack any kind of foundation when considered in the cold light of reason?

Even in the interests of the Christian churches, I consider blood sacrifices and redemption by the crucifixion to be dangerous doctrines. Made dogmas by the early councils they became the authority for torture and murder during the trials of heretics, they became the approved rituals of the Inquisition and even today they 'inspire' salvation-seeking youth and members of obscure sects to ghastly exorcistic ritual murders with those sacrifices these criminals still pretend to 'propitiate' God.

Jesus was a Jew. His date of birth is unknown. His name is not to be found in any register of births, yet the Christian west bases its calendar on the ostensible (and accepted) year of Jesus' birth. The first time that his name appears is in one of St. Paul's epistles, about the year 50 of the new era.