The basic assumption I was working with at the time was that our spirits are unions of who knows how many “intelligences”. Basically the Orson Pratt model. The idea being that as more intelligences joined the union the higher level of intelligence the spirit would be.

Thus I was using phrases like “pre-sentient life” etc to signify less intelligent spirits and humans represented the quasi graduates I guess.

Anyhow I no longer lean toward that model at all mostly because it seems too ludicrous. But I can see in the post I was trying to make the explanations there work with that model.

It looks like I was still leaning toward a spirit atomism model back when I wrote this post. Most of my ideas in the post only hold water if some form of spirit atomism were true. I tend to reject spirit atomism now in favor of a “whole cloth” version of intelligences/spirits.

My position is that the Garden of Eden story as we know it today, the Genesis 2-3 part is not even a good allegory, but rather a product some Yahwist scribe’s wild imagination (cf. the Documentary Hypothesis).

Anything that takes more work to explain away that it provides in support for fundamental principles isn’t even worth propagating as fiction.

That said, it seems to me that Adam and Eve were likely real individuals, on this world, or some other world, and not just metaphors for men and women generally. The post-Garden account is just fine, as is the account of Lucifer in the war in heaven.

Why else can’t you replenish the earth without tasting the forbidden fruit?

Also, don’t make the coats of skin mortal, human bodies. The coats of skin come from a sacrificed animal, showing that naked guilt is covered by scapegoating or sacrifice or the prefigured atonement, from the beginning.

Music suggestion: “These are the Days” then “Eden” from the 10,000 Maniac’s album _Our Time in Eden_

As for naming the animals, that is a good question. I’m not sure what that is symbolic of but it sure seems like it must mean something important — why else would that seemingly random detail be in the record when thousands of other details are not?. I’ll give it some thought and research and if I come up with anything I’ll post it here… (Anyone else have ideas of what the naming of the animals might represent?)

Didn’t Adam name the animals BEFORE he was kicked out? If the story was allegorical why would it matter if he named them before or after?

Why was Adam created first? Why was Eve not created at the same time as Adam?

Eve wasn’t created ex nihilo. The record makes it sound like the original “Adam” in the narrative (as in “the Lord called their name Adam”) was a literal union of both a male and female part. So it appears that the male and female versions of Adam were created at the same time to me.

Why is “gain sentience” called a Fall – seems more like a step up?

See my last post on why gaining sentience would be called a fall.

Why wasn’t Satan smart enough to grab fruit from both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge and have Adam and/or Eve eat both?

Satan represents the ambition/greed/pride within Adam and Eve. See the post again for that answer… I think I already addressed this part. (Perhaps I am misunderstanding your question though..)

What did Satan bother with the excuse about doing the same things as been done in other words?

It is a teaching moment in the narrative explaining that this applies to children of God on every world/probation (and is a support for the MMP notion in my opinion).