Meanwhile, back at the closing of the local homeless shelter, we find Adam and Eve being summarily thrown out of the only home they had ever known -- a tear jerker worthy of the Nightly News. Imagine it, if you will...

LOCAL COUPLE TOSSED OUT OF HOME BY ANGRY LANDLORD!

Adam and Eve (their last names being withheld pending notification of their next of kin) were summarily ejected today from their garden homestead by their landlord god. Their home, located just East of Eden, had been in their family for some 50,000 to 100,000 years. The landlord god, a nefarious character if there ever was one, contends that the expulsion was done because the couple had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The couple countered that they had merely wanted to improve their educational status, and with continuing education classes still some 200,000 years in the future, it was their only way to gain wisdom.

For more background on this incident, we turn to Genesis 3: 1-6:

EDITORIAL COMMENT: This is a true travesty of justice. It is truly disheartening to see a young couple, just starting out in the first few thousand years of their life and trying to educate themselves while simultaneously raising Cain (their first-born son), to have to go through what is -- to all extents and purposes -- a pure case of entrapment. Imagine, if you will, that you were to leave home for a period of time, and leave your two young children alone. You tell them, before you go, that they can do anything in the house that they want, with the single, solitary exception that they must not look in the refrigerator! They can go anywhere, do anything, play whatever game they like... BUT they must not look in the refrigerator. Now. Guess what the kids do the moment you are out of the house!?

But let’s assume that your kids are exceptionally well-behaved, and resist the overwhelming temptation to look in the refrigerator (else why would you have been so adamant about not looking?). However, as landlord, you also allow a devious fellow to enter your home, a fellow who urges and cajoles your children to look in the refrigerator. Then, when you come home and discover the fact that your kids have been in the fridge, you toss them out of the house and forbid them ever to return!

Does this strike you as a slight case of overkill, of possible entrapment in allowing the devious fellow in your home? If you’re the omnipotent being you like to pretend to be, how did this snake-in-the-grass get inside your home in the first place? For that matter, why did you leave your children alone? Why did you add insult to injury by making the refrigerator sound like such an intriguing idea? What exactly is so blasted important about what you’ve got in the refrigerator anyway!? And then you throw them out!? Banish them forever!? This is despicable! Outrageous! A clear violation of civil and uncivil rights, a blatant case of entrapment, a despicable miscarriage of justice, and a gross violation of the covenant of garden landlords and tenant rights.

It is curious that God/Enlil in his benevolence decided to grant one last boon to Cain: After committing Adam’s eldest son to be a fugitive and a vagabond, and hearing Cain complain that his days as a traveler were surely numbered; God then gave Cain a passport to freedom, a mark upon Cain, advertising in effect, that anyone taking vengeance on Cain’s body was going to have seven generations to regret the act. This doesn't sound like Enlil.

One would have to believe, therefore, that it was the god Enki who took pity on Cain (and certainly not Enlil)! It clearly makes no sense that after having cursed him and thrown him out of the state (not just the garden) that a single god would have provided him with diplomatic immunity for the homicidal sibling in his future travels. Unless that god had a split personality.