Article July 16, 2001 Issue

Just because you feel guilty ... doesn't mean you are

Here are some things Adam and Eve didn't know about when they bit into that apple.

By Rosalie E. Dunbar

Imagine yourself in a beautiful garden with a friend. Everything in this place is fresh, enticing. The smells are wonderful. No candy wrappers or beer cans. Just acres of loveliness. Your friend spots a tree that is loaded with luscious apples and suggests that it would be all right to eat one. After all, the tree is so weighed down with fruit that it might even be good for it to have one less apple.

You both know that the rule for that tree is: NO picking or eating. But there's no one watching. Together, you decide to take an apple and share it. At the first bite, guilt courses through your veins. Welcome to the Garden of Eden.

Poor Adam. Poor Eve. According to the Bible, their misadventure with the serpent brought guilt into the world and left the rest of us to plant our own gardens, instead of having the infinitely beautiful garden in which they were created. And guilt continues to be a subject of interest. The Internet search engine Altavista produced over two million hits on guilt and related words like guilty, and so on. And at least some of this guilt is religious guilt.

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