It is a heuristic, if not fictitious, story.
fictitious
/fĭk-tĭsh′əs/
Pertaining to or consisting of fiction; imaginatively produced or set forth; created by the imagination: as, a fictitious hero; fictitious literature.
Existing only in imagination; feigned; not true or real: as, a fictitious claim.
Counterfeit; false; not genuine.
As such, people of faith use the story to condition people’s behavior—plain and simple. Over the eons, the story has been refined and repeated so many times that it has become a central belief.
Why have people of faith bothered with the story so much? It is a very powerful tool to condition people.
The Fall of Man story has become central to the narrative of the human condition as spoken by people of faith. People who want to believe that the overall Creation, Fall, and Restoration narrative is fact or fiction do not care much about examining whether the chapter of the Fall of Man is fact or fiction. It just fits too well into their conceptions of how things are or ought to be.
It is just a matter of time before the Mother of Peace will advise that even the story of the Fall of Man is not fact but fiction and needs to be demoted from the teachings of her movement. She will say that the story of the Fall of Man was adapted to reach out to Christianity, as was the story of Cain and Abel. As she advised, the revision process is already underway. By now, the story of Jacob and Esau has already usurped the story of Cain and Abel. Not that I mind.
I hope that sooner than later, she will also admit that the Unification movement, begun by her late husband, started as a Pikachu movement.
Now, what can replace the story of the Fall of Man? There isn’t a better short story. I wish there were because adolescents cannot yet grapple with the intricacies of psychoanalysis. When adolescents experience puberty, they are thrown into a new world and need guidance as to what is happening to them and how to cope within that new context. The story of the Fall of Man works rather well within the faith community to condition youth – for better or worse. Yes, not all stories are necessarily bad, even the fictitious ones. In that regard, the story of the Fall is a heuristic.
heuristic
A heuristic or heuristic technique (problem-solving, mental shortcut, rule of thumb) is an approach to problem-solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized but is nevertheless “good enough” as an approximation or attribute substitution. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.
Heuristic reasoning is often based on induction or analogy[.] […] Induction is the process of discovering general laws […] Induction tries to find regularity and coherence […] Its most conspicuous instruments are generalization, specialization, and analogy. […] Heuristic discusses human behavior in the face of problems […that have been] preserved in the wisdom of Proverbs.
Wikipedia
I think the Fall of Man story will prevail for a long time…
Yet again, what can replace the heuristic story – eventually? By now, I give credence to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve, Jacques Lacan, and Jessica Benjamin. This will require a post of its own…
