In the interest of accuracy, Original Sin is not actually in the Bible (St. Augustine made it up), so it isn’t necessary to construct a non-literalist apology for it.
Having said that, your scenario isn’t really consonant with Genesis. Genesis specifically says that Adam and Eve did not know right from wrong until after they ate the fruit. Therefore, it could not have been a moral choice, because moral choices require knowledge of right and wrong.
It also doesn’t really make much sense with other Christian conceptions of moral accountability. How can sin be inherited? Sin is an action, a choice. Sin is behavior. What does it mean to say that sin is genetic, and if it’s genetic, then how can people be held morally accountable for it?
There is a strong psychological comfort in knowing someone is in charge (whether that someone is God, Odin, or the Trilateral Commission), and that there are rules (perhaps known only to the adepts, but nevertheless fixed and immutable). For many people, science appears to replace the stability of faith with chaos, where even the adepts/scientists say they do not know everything, and they cannot accept that uncertainty.
With reference to the digression into atheism, note that atheism cannot be the source of either evil or good actions. Atheism is not a religion or a moral code or a guide to daily life, it is not any sort of a something - it is an absence of a belief in any gods - nothing else.
I haven’t read the whole thread, so I apologize for not following the current flow of the discussion. I just have a minute or two, so I’m going to throw this in.
Basically, there is a large percentage of the world’s population that has a very strong drive for certainty. They have trouble with the concept of “No one knows” as an answer to any question they may have. Science unfortunately thrives on that very concept.
While science adds lots of certain knowledge to our world (in fact, it’s the only source of real certainty in most areas), every part of science has questions left unanswered. A scientific mind accepts these unknowns as they come, and hopes they’ll eventually be answered.
An unscientific mind is wigged out by the existence of unanswered questions. Sure, they personally don’t know everything, but they like to feel that somewhere, someone can answer every possible question, not just eventually, but right now.
Science gives these people no comfort. Religion, however, tells them just what they need to hear–It all makes sense. We may not know why or how, but the big guy has it all figured out.
This is not to say that all faith comes from a fear of the unknown. But dislike of science does. I wish we were more sucessful at training young people how to think critically, so that they would not have this backlash against thought.
Humor aside, were are talking about facts and not just opinions here. Science IS more reliable, more accurate than religion or astrology or homeopathy. They ARE baseless.
This is truly amazing since just about every public school student in Alabama goes on a field trip to NASA’s Marshall Space Center in Alabama and it’s every kid’s dream to go to Space Camp nearby.
It’s been around for almost fifty years now. Wernher von Braun was my favorite Alabamian although he was a transplant. I did at least get to see him when I saw the test firing of an Atlas rocket in about 1962.
And even I know a rocket scientist. I thought everyone did.
I grew up in the 1950s in the rural South. I attended a Protestant Church just like everyone else in down did on Sundays. I never heard any objections to science or what was taught in science classes. In fact, there was a renewed appreciation of science once we got into the space race with the USSR.
There was no conflict between my religion and my classroom. I knew that there were things that I would think through when I was older and could understand and that was true. I do believe in the Theory of Evolution. I am not a Biblical literalist, but then, neither was my church. I strongly support science and the scientific method.
I do not believe that these statements can be supported scientifically or even logically.
Not literalist either. You must excuse me, growing up Jewish in NY in a mostly Jewish neighborhood I’ve never grasped the varieties of Christian belief. But I am quite aware that Catholics aren’t even remotely literalists.
Your solution isn’t really any different from what I proposed, and has the same problems. Why would they all sin at the same time. Dio mentioned a problem with the traditional story, but yours has an even bigger one. Could God really expect the first humans, barely beyond the animal stage, to comprehend subtle moral reasoning? Did he zap them from the brute stage to the Spinoza stage? Children grow through similar stages, and every parent knows that they don’t become little moral paragons the first time they grasp that there is such a thing as being bad.
Plus, what sin could tney have committed? I doubt God set up some fruit outside their caves. How were they instructed in moral values? Sorry, Genesis makes more sense than this scenario.
Right; once you purge religion of the factual claims it is making you are removing its specifically *religious *elements and it becomes just another species of value inquiry. Ergo, it is no longer religion.
Of course they are “logical”. In what way is a worldview based on falsehoods and illogic compatible with science ?
And I say that “religion is by nature hostile to everything but itself”, because religion denies reality. In other words, everything. You aren’t supposed to care about the facts; you aren’t supposed to care if it makes any logical sense or not; a believer is supposed to just believe. Religion is an insistence on imposing a massively false worldview on the world, and is thus the enemy of everything, since everything violates it’s principles. Religion is a jealous belief system.
As for supporting my statements scientifically, when was the last time that science did anything to religion but show it to be wrong ? Where’s the evidence that religion IS anything but what I called it, “delusions and irrationality” ? So far, science has always shown it to be just that.
Sin is intrinsic to the human condition: in practice one can’t be alive without getting one’s hands dirty. To err is human, etc. etc. The Adam and Eve story is an illustration, a parable for all that.
Nice cite. Primarily, I want to note that non-overlapping magisteria is conventional wisdom among moderate Christians. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of it - and OBTW I really don’t know the ins and outs of the argument. Notwithstanding my categorical language, there’s nothing wrong with challenging this POV.
Punt!
Attempting salvation without Jesus is spiritually dangerous: analogously, Catholics are advised that the Catholic path to salvation is best.
—But what specific claims does Episcopalians make?
Beats me. The sect is know for being doctrinal in theory but tolerant and highly ecumenical in practice. The doctrine is founded on scripture and The Book of Common Prayer, at least according to the chart in the 1997 World Almanac. More: “…sacrament taken to be symbolic, but as having real spiritual effects.”
— Does anyone have to be saved? Is it all works? If Adam and Eve fell up, why were they punished? - even metaphorically.
Episcopalians are basically the US branch of the Anglican Church.
“Fell up”, btw, is just one interpretation, the kind of thing discussed in seminaries: I did not mean to imply that it was church doctrine. The main point I was getting at is that it’s pretty easy to assemble one or more sane Christian frameworks that don’t conflict with science. Indeed, I’d argue that they are the rule more than the exception in mainline churches.
I’m not sure I’d agree 100%. I can imagine philosophers making claims about the world. Aristotle certainly did. But that he was wrong just means that he as a person was mistaken. When a religion, any religion, is proved to be wrong it gives up its special role of a conduit of god’s will to man. I’m not sure it then stops being a religion, or just is proven to be a false religion. But I do agree what it becomes is an inquiry into values, just like ethics.
The same could be said about Shakespeare, provided there were those who took a fundamentalist approach to The Bard.
Of course, nobody does that (that I know of). But not all religions have a tradition of intolerance that Christianity does (a tradition which greatly aided its survival, I might add). For example, the core elements of Buddhism are not supernatural, and there’s even a quote attributed to Buddha that considers the possibility of the absence of an afterlife.
Well, some parts of your church sound like Baptists more than UU these days, especially in the area of gay ministers. And some sound like lovely, ethical, people.
I have no doubt that many mainline churches truly and deeply believe that they have no conflict with science. My contention is that there are many who partition the part of their mind dealing with faith from that understanding and accepting science. while the literalists hold their religious beliefs rigidly, and distort their understanding of the natural world to match them, perhaps the mainline Christians fully and honestly accept the natural world as it is, and twist their religious beliefs to match. That’s certainly an admirable position, but if there is a god and if a given religion has some special access to that god, isn’t changing the tenets supposedly recevived from that access, that inspiration, taking you further from god?
Philosophers try to understand things through reason, and through history their understanding changes, sometimes drastically. If religion has special access, reason isn’t required to the level you get information from that access. If reason alone is supposed to tell you about god, mustn’t you accept at least the possibility that it will tell you there is nothing there to worship?
None of this would be a problem if you could use the principles of science to lead you to god, which is what a lot of churchmen thought would happen in the early 19th century. I think it is fair to say that science has led us away from any of the views of god held before then, and it has certainly reduced the need for one based on our understanding of the natural world. I’ve read Gould’s book, and this is where I think he is wrong, since he gave extreme examples of problems in considering science and religion together, and did not consider more subtle problems.
Classical philosophy and classical science were basically undersood as the same thing in Aristotle’s day. Philosophy WAS science, and Aristotle engaged in a lot of natural philosphy and cataloguing and stuff. He was a pretty fair country biologist, for instance.
Aristotle ended up being kind of the Wikipedia of the Middle Ages. The go-to sorce for practically any question. He usually had an answer and half the time it was wrong.
If sin is intrinsic to the human condition, i.e. a necessary byproduct of us being human, and god made us human, why are we being punished for the way he made us? The original story has the advantage that it can be construed (with some contortions) in such a way that Adam made a free choice to eat the apple (ignoring, for a moment, the question of how he should have known it was wrong to do so if the knowledge of right and wrong could only be bestowed by that very apple), thus sinning against god; what you’re saying is basically that god made us to sin, which eliminates that choice.
No; Shakespeare isn’t the kind of all-encompassing worldview that religion is. It’s never going to be as intolerant as religion because it doesn’t have as much to be intolerant about. And the reason “nobody does that” is BECAUSE it’s not religion, or anything like it. It does not deny reality, and denial of reality is the core of religion.
And ALL religion is intolerant; if not necessarily of unbelievers, of reality and of logic. There’s no facts supporting any religion, no rational reason to be religious; it requires irrationality and a denial of the value of reality.
