Honestly, I’ve personally never understood the concept. I can address the “what” but the “why” is lost on me. I don’t understand why the conversation inside the RCC came up in the first place, and I certainly don’t understand (from a religious perspective, at least. From a pysical/political perspective it was to enhance the influence the RCC had on the populace) why it was necessary to inform this opinion in the first place.
I know it stemmed from “Why do people do evil?” but to answer that question the RCC basically gave a fairly firm reason to reject the existence of God. They were doing more service for their physical realm than for their religious realm.
“Man is born innately sinful and must be redeemed through the church for salvation.”
The Adam-and-Eve perspective is a parallel line of thinking that was put into the Roman catechism ca 420AD, but it wasn’t the only form of the thought.
The Christian concept of original sin is a way of trying to understand suffering and death, a fundamental task of religion.
My own sense of it is influenced by my years of being a Buddhist, but I do not see the two as unreconcilable. I think of original sin as the refusal of connection with the divine, which is love. It is the fundamental decision to separate one’s individual consciousness from the great consciousness which is God. It is not any single sinful act, it is the cause of such acts.
My understanding of Catholic teaching is that this refusal to connect is what damns people to hell. In fact it’s what hell is: separation from God, an act of will. The concept of free will is inextricable from the concept of original sin.
Have I mentioned that the shallowness of so many of the posts against religion (Adam and Eve didn’t really exist! So how stupid those billion or so people who are Christian must be!) only shine an unfavorable light upon those who continue to gleefully post such silliness? Oh, I guess I probably have.
Basically, Czarcasm was questioning that if you maintain that the Garden of Eden story was a parable (and not historical) then how did that Eden story give rise to “Original Sin” as a form of thought. If it was a parable and not historical, the “original sin” wouldn’t have originated there, thus where did “original sin” come from.
If you come from a denomination of Christianity that maintains the Garden of Eden as a fact, then the original sin’s source can still come from there. If you come from a denomination of Christianity that maintains that Eden was a parable, then how do you maintain the concept of Original Sin (if your denomination actually DOES maintain the concept of Original Sin.)
Unless, of course, I am going the completely wrong way with Czarcasm’s inquiry.
I find it funny that you’re commenting on the shallowness of the OP when you don’t seem to have understood it.
To rephrase:
The RCC says the story of the fall is just a story.
But the story of the fall explains where original sin came from.
If the fall didn’t really happen, whence the original sin?
ETA: and now it’s been explained again, and probably better, but I’ll leave mine up in case another rephrasing will make sense to someone.
If you want to buy the literalism (which you apparently don’t), then God said it to Adam and Eve, in American English.
If you want to buy the parable, then God said it to everybody, by injecting it into the brains of the people who wrote the bible. Or – God said it to those people who wrote it – have we got an ID on them?
I think this is a good question and, strangely, not one I can remember hearing/reading before.
I don’t think we can make an “original sin” = “free will” argument without further hurting the theology (else Mary didn’t have any free will, not that the Immaculate Conception story doesn’t already irredeemably harm the Jesus Redeemer story). If free will IS sin, then to be given free will is to be given sin, which just moves the problem back a step.
Parable: People were happy in every way because they were in harmony with God. There was no suffering and no death and no fear. Then they listened to a voice telling them that God wasn’t telling them everything, he was keeping them in the dark for his own selfish reasons. Because they listened to that voice they became separated from all other beings and from God.
When I read this story as an adult I was deeply impressed with how layered and complex it was. They ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil: they became human. With all the suffering that entails. It is not a simple “they disobeyed so they got punished” story at all. It’s a story about consciousness and its consequences.
I don’t understand why you don’t think a story has to be literal (not a parable) if it is to have meaning.
The church I grew up would say Adam and Eve were real people exactly as described in genesis and that events transpired exactly as described. Original sin is the idea that humans are born sinful and separated from God just by virtue of being born as desendents of the two of them.
To have free will is to have the option of sin. Free will also must be conscious – it is an important part of the concept of sin that one must know one is doing wrong and do it anyway, if it is to be classified as a sin.
Because a just-so story doesn’t actually explain why the elephant has a trunk even if it is enjoyable as a story. Your parable can mean “being apart from God is bad!” but it doesn’t actually explain the origin of the thing the OP is asking about, which is a specific thing that we’re all supposed to be born with, except Mary and Jesus.
If it’s just being more or less removed from God, then there should be more or less Original Sin in people. Some people are really good and holy and do what God wants, so they should have less of it. Some people are really bad and evil and reject God, so they should have more of it. But if it’s something we’ve all got equally, then it’s not something based on our own actions. Its origin is outside of our own wills. Mary’s conception had to be re-jiggered in order for her to be born without it. That’s not a free will issue! That’s not a “Gosh, people sure are separate from God!” issue. That’s a “People have a genetic stain” issue.
We are made out of meat. We have to eat other living things to stay alive. Also, as we live our lives, there is no way that we can avoid hurting other people. We can put effort into reducing the number, but we can never get it to zero. So just by being alive, we cannot be innocent (harmless).
I am still getting the feeling that I don’t understand the question at all. Since I am coming from the parable-about-consciousness side, I don’t understand this emphasis on its literal truth or falsity. The story of the Fall is a story about the origin of our human state of consciousness, I’m not getting why this is difficult.
Biblical literalists are like literalists in all things, they are not available to the poetry. In this they have more in common with some rationalists than might appear. In both cases I feel that my feet are being encased in the concrete.