Jesus H. Christ

[John_W.Kennedy]

@CurtC

So the “taint of Original Sin” means what exactly? I think that “original sin” was the sin of Adam & Eve, of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, did I get that right?

No, although that is a grammatically correct interpretation, when a theologian uses the term “original sin”, he is normally referring to the doctrine that all humans except Adam, Eve, and Jesus (and Mary, if he’s a Roman Catholic) are in a state of sin from the beginning. Just how severe this is is one of the main disputes between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but both parties agree that it’s there.

@CurtC

And because of that, God kicked them out of Eden, and cursed them and their descendants in certain ways, such as pain in childbirth.

Actually, the text of Genesis uses the words “multiply thy sorrow”, which is taken by many RC’s to mean that childbirth would have entailed some pain even had Eve never sinned.

@CurtC

So are you saying that Mary was not cursed like this? Did Jesus’s birth not cause Mary physical pain?

To quote The Catholic Encyclopedia:

The formal active essence of original sin was not removed from her soul, as it is removed from others by baptism; it was excluded, it never was in her soul. Simultaneously with the exclusion of sin. The state of original sanctity, innocence, and justice, as opposed to original sin, was conferred upon her, by which gift every stain and fault, all depraved emotions, passions, and debilities, essentially pertaining to original sin, were excluded. But she was not made exempt from the temporal penalties of Adam – from sorrow, bodily infirmities, and death.

I suppose pain of childbirth could be included under “bodily infirmities”. However, it is generally accepted in RCism, though not official doctrine, that the birth of Jesus was painless. (This would seem to follow, in fact, from the RC belief that, by miracle, Mary remained physically a virgin even after giving birth.)

[CurtC]

Thanks for the explanation. I was raised deeply imbedded in Southern Baptism, and now am a devout atheist, but I feel a need to understand this kind of stuff. Is there some Biblical basis for all of this belief about Mary? The Catholics seem to have a lot invested in the purity of Mary, and I don’t recall that subject ever coming up in my Baptist upbringing.

My impression is that the RC church has a history of a couple of thousands of years of scholars reading the Bible and thinking about what everything means, reading between the lines, and extrapolating, which could lead to this Mary business. Baptists, on the other hand, use the Bible as a primary source of their belief (instead of scholarly interpretation of it), so don’t get all this dogma; on the other hand, they’re stuck with the literal interpretation with all its nonsensical stuff and contradictions, trying to shoehorn that into their modern lives.

[John_W.Kennedy]

Traditional Christianity derives belief from three different sources:[ul]
[li]Scripture[/li][li]Reason, and[/li][li]Tradition.[/li][/ul]

As to the Immaculate Conception, since we are getting in pretty deep now, I think it best just to point you to the relevant article in the Catholic Encyclopedia.