Humans are so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about.
The biblical view of the history of humankind and of each individual man or woman is contained in the first three chapters of Genesis. We are created to serve God by loving God and each other in freedom and joy, but we invariably choose bondage and woe instead as prices not too high to pay for independence. To say that God drove Adam and Eve out of Eden is apparently a euphemism for saying that Adam and Eve, like the rest of us, made a break for it as soon as God happened to look the other way. If God really wanted to get rid of us, the chances are God wouldn't have kept hounding us every step of the way ever since.
~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
