THE KNOWLEDGE (Genesis 3)

  RELIGION. 

God created man. He placed him in a garden called Paradise. There was no pain, suffering, or sorrow. Man lived in peaceful, loving relationship with God. That is the environment for which we were created. We were never designed to live apart from peace, love, and acceptance.
The day Adam ate the forbidden fruit, he acquired a new capacity for the human race: the knowledge of good and evil. With this knowledge, man now started making decisions about good and evil independently of God. Man began to determine righteousness apart from God. Subsequently, he rejected God's standards and developed his own. Hence, we have the birth of religion.
Religion has always been mean, and it is still mean. The first religion is the same as it has always been. It is man attempting to relate to God on his own terms. In order to do that we must, of course, reject God's terms. We also must reject anyone who does not comply to our terms.
The first religion caused Cain to kill Abel. He hated him because Abel's sacrifice was accepted and his wasn't. He had labored for his sacrifice. Logic would say that his was of more value, but Cain was operating in his own knowledge of righteousness and unrighteousness: "Cain ... slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous" (1 John 3:12).
Thousands of years later, Paul said, in the book of Galatians 4:29, that the children of the flash always persecute the children of the Spirit. In other words, the religious always persecute the righteous. Why? The religious despise the righteousness that God has chosen and given.

There is a logic to religion:
- Religion is man's attempt to be right with God and find peace in a way that makes sense to him.
- Religion sees the greatest need of man as being right.
- To the religious logic, being right is equivalent to being right with God.
- If someone doesn't agree with us, he is implying that we are wrong.
- Since it is essential that we be right, we must prove him wrong.
- If we can't prove him wrong, then we kill him.

That's exactly what Cain did.
The need to be right has tormented men since the day Adam ate the fruit. Adam started making decisions apart from God right off the bat. "We had better make some clothes to cover ourselves, because I don't think it's right to be naked before God. We had better hide when God calls us. He's probably mad".  Man began to scramble to be right. But every decision to be right, apart from God's perspective, drove him deeper into pain, suffering, and self- imposed separation from God. (James B. Richards, The Gospel of Peace).

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