Evangelicals insist that, if you don't buy into the whole apple and serpent myth, then the death of Jesus is meaningless. To my mind, Jesus's message was that the wrathful Yahweh of the Old Testament should give way to a loving God and, more importantly, a religion driven by love, by charity, by sympathy, by empathy, by caring. His death was the ultimate demonstration of self-sacrifice. Those of us who claim to be Christians deserve that title to the extent that we embrace and live Jesus's ethical credo... not to the extent we embrace poetry that has no basis in empirical evidence. We humans are unique, not because we are descended from one man and one woman created by God from the dust of the earth, but we are unique only to the extent that we embrace the ethical values which we of all earth's species are uniquely capable of embracing.
Apparently, at least some evangelical theologians are coming around to this view:
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/09/138957812/evangelicals-question-the-existence-of-adam-and-eve
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMWLjgPTR_c
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