It isn't 42, it's "for two". As in tea for two... Therefore I conclude that the Universe was a British conspiracy and Douglas Adams as a Godless Atheistic Pommy Bastard was in it up to his eyeballs. That's why they bumped him off. Heart attack my arse!
Douglas Adams somewhere in his trilogy made a fairly insightful remark about the Adam/Eve/Apple story. Something along the lines that if God puts trees in a garden and then says don't eat the fruit, then he is probably some kind of trickster who will catch you out eventually.
Phillip Pullman seemed to make the same point in his Golden Compass - and although it is only a children's book, Pullman did himself say he was setting himself up against the somewhat cloying and boring harmonious utopias that CS Lewis described - so I am inclined to take this passage seriously.
At the end of the Golden Compass Pullman alters a bible verse
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and your daemons shall asume their true forms, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil......
And the yes of them both were opened, and they saw the true form of their daemons, and spoke with them.
etc etc
The rest of the book is about a cute little girl who can read symbols and how the worlds are going to be bridged by a "phenomenal burst of energy". Poor Mr Pullman is in for a very big disappointment...... Suffice to say I think the Catholic Church would be the least of Lyra's concerns.
But the point remains, if you have apples why not eat them? Normally I would agree, but one problem is people who eat these apples seem to act like deranged obnoxious morons and - however historically justified this may have been - they keep their apple eating a secret.
Which sort of begs the question as to why the apples are there to be eaten. And that is where the story of Frankenstein comes in, there is no denying the pathos of Frankenstein's monster, that fate seemed to have dealt him a very hard hand. Any reader feels sympathy - in fact, towards the end the Monster threatens to steal the show.
But in the end he is still a monster.