The Abomination that is Original Sin

Great Debates
1

I have long felt that Original Sin was a deeply flawed concept. Lately, I have begun to think it goes well beyond flawed and into the realm of extreme evil. The principal tenet of this idea states that man is inherently base and corrupt. The blanket nature of this condemnation serves to lay a foundation for perpetual guilt and atonement where none was ever required. It would ordinarily be useful to point out how this foundation serves as a base of control for organized Christian religion. In this case, the destructive moral and psychological impact of Original Sin upon the human mind makes operation of the church look like small potatoes.

The notion of Original Sin is reminiscent of nothing more than the old Soviet police state. Sufficient numbers of repressive laws were passed whereby everybody was guilty of some crime or another. All that remained was for you to be arrested when the whim struck those in control. So it is with Original Sin. All people are tainted and incapable of enlightened action until and unless they are brought into line with Christian religious thought. This pitting of man against his own rational mind is a monstrous crime. To deny that man is capable of self-elevation and improvement except through acceptance of supernatural belief is a vicious assault on reason. Lest anyone forget, it is only through rational conduct and use of reason that we can possibly feed or clothe ourselves.

In a takeoff on the old adage, “Seeing is believing …,” there is now a phrase filtering through the Christian fundamentalist community that goes:

“Sometimes you must believe before you can see.”

This epitomizes the avoidance of reason in pursuit of arbitrary whim. It is another facet of how creationists reject causality. To pronounce that mental determination precedes sensory input is akin to saying that nourishment occurs before digestion. The obliteration of rationality required to adopt such nonsense is nothing short of mind death. The subversion of the human ego sought through application of Original Sin is the exact same sort of mind death. Creationism seeks to make emotion the wellspring of reality instead of recognizing that all emotion stems from our experience of the world around us. This impermissible reversal of causality is reflected by the denial of any worth in ego and the concomitant abasement of man in general.

You should hear the evasive and contradictory answers given by Christian fundamentalists to one simple question I have come up with:

“What about the souls of all those who lived before the birth of Jesus? Are they all damned to Hell even if they led blameless lives solely because they were unable to accept Christ as their savior?”

I ask them this to point out the path of good that I do my own best to follow. I mention how I refuse to believe that I shall be thrown into a lake of fire for my lack of belief. My position posits that I am capable of making correct and proper decisions and leaves open the argument of man’s hubris or pride of self. At the same time it is an even more monstrous hubris to presume that all mankind is sinful by nature and incapable of doing good except through the will of a supernatural being.

What follows is a stunning manifestation of such abasement. It appeared in Sunday’s online edition of the Philippine Star newspaper under their “Star Word of the Day” sidebar. The concept it conveys is almost as revolting as the concept of Original Sin itself.

“There’s no limit to the good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

If you do not care how much harm is done, then the above statement is perfectly true. Should no one care if Hitler, Stalin or Osama bin Laden gets all the credit for your good works? This abnegation of self and ego are sterling examples of how Christian religion seeks to obliterate self worth and self esteem. So long as Original Sin remains a central tenet of Christian religion, I am utterly incapable of giving it any credibility.

Fortunately, this has little or nothing to do with the putative existence of God or any other supreme being. I remain revolted that a major religion can permit such a corruption of the human spirit as Original Sin and still claim to uplift man in any way whatsoever.

2

Ooh! Can I call Godwin’s Law on this one?

Your comments on original sin I’ll let stand for now. It’s your strange connection of that with this quote “there’s no limit to the good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit” and your bizarre, bizarre inferences from this.

The point of such sentiments is that good works should not be ABOUT the credit, but about the works. If I feed the homeless for the sake of feeding the homeless, then at the end of the day, who cares if I’m recognised for it or not? A good has been done. If I wander around saying “look at me, I’m really wonderful, I’m feeding the homeless, bask in my glory,” I’m getting in the way of my own achievements, principally by being a sanctimonious prick.

How on earth you get from such things to “yeah, let’s all do goog things and say that HITLER did them” is beyond me.

3

Well, I think the doctrine came out of an attempt to explain 2 things. Firstly, why we all have the inclination to sin and to do bad things, and secondly, what the purpose of Jesus’s life and death was.

And I don’t know that there’s anything that bad about believing that human beings are inherantly corrupt. It makes as much sense as believing that we’re inherantly good, I suppose, and you can find evidence that points either way, because we do do some good things, but we also do some pretty bad things

4

Actually, I’m inclined to believe that humans are inherently bad. Not necessarily inherently evil, but at least bad. We are bad by nature and only good by nurture (education, etc) When was the last time you saw a dog laugh at someone in pain? When was the last time you saw a human child do it? Do dogs bite for their own amusement? Do children hit for their own amusement?

5

We are not actually inherently corrupt or good. We either choose to be good or we choose to be bad. The original sin, that of Adam and Eve eating the fruit was not simply a case of eating fruit that was not theirs. It was a sign to God that they thought they’d be better off without his direction in matters on earth. In effect Adam and Eve rebelled over God’s direction and said to God by eating the fruit that they did not want his guidance and that he did not have the right to rule over mankind.

… and now we have this earth full of bloodshed, wars, Saddams, Hitlers, Osama bin Ladens, starvation and all kinds of badness … all because the first humans wanted independence from the almighty. Yes, we have our independence for now, but at what cost? Are we really free? Free from death and pestilence? NOT!

6

that there is a divine spark within all of us that is our birthright. I’ve never considered original sin as anything more than a sad myth.

7

You consider the original sin a myth because you don’t understand what the original sin was really about. I say again, it wasn’t simply about eating some forbidden fruit. There was a serious issue at the heart of it all. Adam chose to believe the lie told by the devil and made the decision to follow the devil’s lead in opposition to God.

8

And, Webman, much as I dislike appearing to call someone’s religious belief’s “wrong”, I have to ask:

By what right are the children born today held accountable for the Adamic sin?

9

We are not actually held accountable of the adamic sin. Otherwise we would not have any hope of finding favor by God. However, Adam could not pass on perfection when they (Adam and Eve) had become imperfect in God’s eyes. We are sufferring for what they did not because we actually deserve to suffer, but because people want to be independent from God. It’s that independence that causes suffering just as Saddam Husein causes sufferring of his people.

I really must not open up in more than one thread … too many questions :smiley: and not enough time to answer them all.

10

Also, the Bible doesn’t say that the serpent was Satan.

11

BTW, how did they know it was wrong to eat the fruit if they didn’t know right from wrong yet?

12

Sorry, webman, but that doesn’t answer the question.

Whatever you want to call it, the fact remains that people living today are being condemned by the actions of one who came before, not by their own actions. The “being unable to pass on perfection” is just another way of saying “passing on sin,” as the effects are the same. Either way, there is condemnation and damnation in the eyes of God.

So I ask again. By what right are those born today held accountable and judged for the actions of one man?

13

How do you prove such a base and baseless assumption concerning human society? Such an immediate and unwarranted presumption casts all your suceeding words into complete doubt.

If all people were inclined to be sinful (even in small ways), the human race would have perished in ages past. As with a transoceanic voyage, any unsteady hand upon the tiller brings one wide of the mark. So would the genetic pool have been steered into oblivion long ago by dint of your improperly putated human inclination towards evil. The social contract (in many ways represented by a lot of Mosaic law in the Ten Commandments) is a highly efficient tool and has been producing functional human beings for untold millions of years.

It is only poisonous philosophy that propagates criminal behavior, be it a corrupt CEO or a common street mugger, not to mention a child abusing priest or debauched charismatic preacher. There have always been people of this sort throughout all time. It is merely recorded history (mass media), and technology (projectile weapons, flight, explosives, NBC warfare) that have so recently augmented their malignance. The evil we speak of is more commonly known as antisocial behavior, be it pathological or psychological. Such people’s aberrance is just that, aberrant behavior that is not common to all people. As mentioned, if it were common to all folk, we would all have died off in times long past. How then do you justify your claim that all people have a sinful inclination? I refuse to believe such a contradictory and hypocritical statement.

I have neglected to mention one critical element. It is known as belief in a malevolent universe. Original Sin is a hallmark of such a mentality and I firmly believe that people who are willing to accept the existence of a malevolent universe are anti-life and practice a breed of spiritual murder. Just as the anticipated violence of Armageddon presupposes the existence of a near-omnipotent evil, such pessimism as to the human spirit is condemning a crucial spark of life in its purest form. That glimmering is called volition (or even free thought) and involves what is known as social coherence. All of us good souls (reincarnated, redeemed, made afresh, whatever … ) have been doing this for all of time. Ever since human intelligence evolved, people have done the right thing most often in order to keep all of us alive. Our mere continuing existence as a race in such gigantic numbers proves it beyond a doubt.

What you are saying is that eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge gave us volition. How did we act before then to make it through so many million years of humanity’s steady climb up the ladder of life? Always inclined to be sinful? That is not possible, a society of 100% looters would implode instantly. Incorrect volitional (criminal) behavior in society is and should be corrected by it. Abandonment of syllogistic thought is not possible and several pillars of human consciousness crumble simultaneously if you deny its eternal and essential goodness. Human volition is good, has always been good and must always be good. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t we all have perished by now? If all people were evil, how could enough of any of us survive long enough to perpetuate the human race in such a healthy way? Our erstwhile avoidance of global nuclear war stands in stark testimony to this fact.

This even includes the remotest possibility that the human race might find your acclaimed Savior, Jesus. The ability to recognize even the least concept of a Messiah (be it Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist or Yahweh) intrinsically presupposes a rational consciousness. Neither the assumed placement in time of Eden nor Jesus Christ’s advent upon the face of planet earth were critical precursors to the human mind and its conscious ability. It is proven to have existed along with cohesive collective behavior long before anything within recorded history. I utterly fail to see how I should be persuaded to assume that people are bad-natured as a whole. Nowhere is it proven and neither is it an acceptable assumption for ANYONE to make. It is an insult to basic logic and the very best of human rationality to preume so.
P. S. McDuff,

In days of old, I would have re-posted a special mention of my pleasure at seeing you here. Due to the quite honorable practice of conserving bandwidth, I am obliged to post script this message in one of my most heartfelt threads. I welcome your lucid insight.

Regards,

Chris

14

Revelation 12:9
The great dragon was hurled down - that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray.

15

I’ve always personally found the concept of Original Sin to be abhorrent and self-defeating.

When I was married, it was very important to my then-husband (Irish Catholic) that our daughter be baptized. I was brought up in a Jewish household (adopted) and chose Paganism (not specifically Wicca, I’m an Eclectic Pagan, meaning I have incorporated concepts from many different traditions to form my beleif system) as closest to what I have always believed and felt. I told him in no uncertain terms that I found the concept of Original Sin something I could not label my child with, and that if he wanted her baptized, he was going to have to do the ceremony alone.

I did attend her baptism, but I sat with his and my family. My in-laws were very angry with me, for they had to explain to all their Irish-Catholic friends why I refused to participate in the ceremony and my husband wasn’t all that happy with me about it either. (unlike the priest, who I spoke with beforehand, understood, and had no problem with it)

He asked me repeatedly why I couldn’t just participate in the ceremony, and that it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t believe or not, he just didn’t want this “to become a problem”. Well, it already WAS a problem, imho. I explained to him that in no way could I condone a ceremony that labeled my daughter a sinner for nothing more than being born. How could this wonderful, sweet-smelling angel be a sinner, just because I gave birth to her?

Simple. She wasn’t, and there wasn’t a force in the world that would have made me claim so, including tacit approval of a baptism ceremony for her. When she’s old enough, I hope to teach her about ALL religions, and let her pick one that fits her belief system. I’ll support her no matter what she chooses.

I don’t regret my decision to NOT participate in her baptism in any way. Course, I don’t regret my divorce in anyway either, but that’s another thread altogether.

16

This says everything.

17

I don’t presume to answer the question as webman might, however, I think a lot of it depends on whether you consider Original Sin to be a longstanding grudge held by God, or a fundamental and heritable brokenness in the human race; I believe that I’m right in saying that the Christian doctrine is not that God judges people based on the actions of their distant ancestor, but rather that the distant ancestor did something that caused a fundamental and damaging change (in terms of his ability to interact with God) in his own nature, and that having broken his own nature, he was unable to pass on a perfect nature to his offspring. Sort of Lamarckism, I suppose, but on a spiritual level.

I’m not going to try to personally defend the integrity of this view, as I am not myself convinced that Genesis is to be read as literal truth, but the above is my understanding of the views of those that do take it literally.

18

I’m not a Christian and I’ve only read the Bible once, but I interpreted the original sin thing a little differently. Since eating the fruit gave Adam and Eve knowledge of the possibilities of the world (good and bad), this knowledge would necessarily be perpetuated to the rest of humanity through the ages, and hence, humans would forever have the ability to willfully commit sin. It’s kind of like Pandora’s box.

So, take murder for example. Prior to eating the fruit, it wouldn’t occur to anybody to commit murder. After eating the fruit, the idea that murder was possible would be floating around forever, and thus a potential for a new type of sin existed that hadn’t before. So, by eating the fruit, humans created possibilities for sin that just simply didn’t exist before, and all humanity would forever have to deal with that.

Like I said, I’m probably completely wrong, and I’d be interested if someone can tell me why. I did have a friend once who was a Southern Baptist, and they told me that according to Christians, everything God does in the OT is by definition just and right, since God can never be wrong or commit sin. Therefore, the original sin concept is by definition just and right. YMMV.

19

So, basically, God wanted us to be mindless drones, and (according to the Bible) the human race is forever doomed because we can actively choose to be good, instead of just being good because we’re too ignorant to know there’s another way to be?

I knew there was a reason I never took Christianity seriously.

20

Cerri, I’m not going to be able to defend my position with Biblical references because, as I stated, I’m not a Christian, so I didn’t even try to read it literally or with any type of meaningful justification to life in general. If you say that the Bible says that humans are forever doomed, I’ll have to take your word for it.

Some of the Bible is an interesting read, but there are parts that have very difficult and conflicting language, so I just interpreted it the best I could. I didn’t get the impression that humans were forever doomed though. Only that individual humans had the choice to doom themselves in a post-fruit era.

As for humans being mindless drones prior to eating the fruit, well, I don’t agree that a lack of awareness of the potential for sin equates with mindless. IMO, it simply means that certain things were just outside the realm of possibility pre-fruit.

I think it’s best if I remove myself from this discussion now, since I certainly shouldn’t be speaking for how Christians may or may not interpret their text. Cheers.