Disobedience has been the doorway to progress as often as "enlightenment" has always been denounced by those in power at the time, as an act of heresy. Those we view as heroes in retrospect, in other words, are always seen as heretics in their own time. In short, we condemn the Devil for the same disobedience to authority that we applaud in Jesus Christ.
Like Prometheus, Adam and Eve stole the fire of "knowledge" from a God who, out of a desire to keep humanity as dumb and obedient as domesticated beasts, had expressly forbidden them from learning. This same prohibition against learning was imposed upon African slaves by Christian Europeans, once the latter had been stolen from their homeland and sold into slavery for the enrichment of the former.
And like both Adam and Eve (and all of humanity that followed), the means by which those African slaves would eventually be kept ignorant with invisible chains, came from addicting them to a "desire" for salvation, and the "belief" that such a salvation could only come from obedience to the "sacred traditions" of Christianity - a religion that taught Africans (and all of humanity that followed) that their slavery was but a reflection of their relationship with God, and to please that God and hope to get to heaven, they had to please their master here on Earth.
Jesus likewise defied both the Sanhedrin - the temple priests who claimed their authority came from God - and their "divine" interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. And like those African slaves, all three - Adam, Even and Jesus - were brutally punished for their disobedience.
What Adam, Eve, and Jesus all have in common, then, is that they were no less disobedient to God (or those who claimed to be his divinely appointed agents) than the Devil himself. And in this same way, all new ideas necessarily begin with someone who has the courage to doubt the old ones, and all progress is a form of heresy to the "sacred" teachings and traditions of the past.
From the American Colonialists who rebelled agaisnt King George, to Rosa Parks who rebelled against racism in the United States, those who "honor" tradition are as much like the devil toward progress and the quest for knowledge, as those who are willing to dishonor those traditions in pursuit of human freedom and progress are like Jesus Christ.
Those who "defend" their "sacred" traditions, in other words, do so because those traditions tend to favor their status, their comforts, and their way of living and thinking, the most. Slavery and the system of "separate but equal" that followed in the Jim Crow South, for example, overwhelmingly favored the mentalities and social arrangements enjoyed by whites, which is why the majority of white people in America opposed Civil Rights in the 1960s as much as they opposed the abolition of slavery more than a century earlier. They were, to put it in political terms, "Conservative" for the traditions that constituted their own "comfort zone."
No one likes to upset the apple cart of their little garden of Eden, after all, regardless of how others must suffer for the privilege of keeping the cart right where it is, so some can eat as many of those apples as they please, even if others starve in the process.
It is only through the sustained disobedience of slaves to their masters, from Haiti to America, that Christianity was finally converted from a religion that defended slave masters, to a religion of "let my people go." And it was only through the writings of people like Harriett Beecher Stowe and Fredrick Douglass - and not the "enlightenment" of Europeans or providence of their "Christian" faith - that the verses in the Bible that had always been used to justify and defend slavery, were finally reinterpreted to be condemnations of it instead.
Without disobedience, America would not exist, African Americans would still be slaves, and there would be no such thing as Christianity, since Jesus would never have dared to question the authority and the traditions of his own religion, or the Sanhedrin. Obedience, on the other hand, was how Germany convinced the most Christian and law abiding society of the 20th century that committing genocide was as holy as reading the Old Testament.
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