The Doctrine of Original Sin is a venerable Christian belief that enjoys widespread acceptance, who taught it Jesus or Paul? Do you understand it?
Blueblades
The Doctrine of Original Sin, who taught it , Jesus or Paul?
by Blueblades 8 Replies latest jw friends
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Gill
Paul being the ultimate misoginist, he must have considered sex as something evil and sinful.
I wonder how he came about, or if he was the first test tube baby.
I can't imagine the character of Jesus as being so uncool as to consider sex an original sin.
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Narkissos
I'd vote for Augustine.
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aniron
If you think sex was the Original sin, then why did God tell Adam Eve to be "fruitful and mutiply" ??Show me scripture where Paul was against sex or that he hated women? I'd go along with Augustine and the rest of Catholic teaching on the subject.
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Undecided
I think someone misunderstood the original sin. It was disobedience by eating the fruit. Sex has always been OK with your wife. Why would God make us with the desire and tools for sex if we weren't supposed to do it. Sex is what life is about, without it all life would die out in a few years.
Ken P.
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tetrapod.sapien
the doctrine itself is quite absurd when taken literally, as Darwin (and common sense) has done much damage to the concept.
if it's not literal, well then, whatever.
but from what i understand, the concept was originally taught by the isrealites to account for injustice and suffering in the natural/human world.
from wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
TSClassical Biblical and Orthodox Jewish view
The Original sin, or HaChet Hakadmon (in Hebrew -- ???? ??????), is the episode of Adam's sin in the Book of Genesis. Chet Kadmon is a back-formation from the Christian term; in classical Jewish literature, Adam's sin is known as Chet Adam HaRishon, (??? ??? ??????), which translates to "Sin of the First Man." Alternatively, Adam HaRishon can be taken as Adam's personal name, in which case the phrase translates as "Adam's Sin."
The account in Genesis 2-3 implies that Adam and Eve initially lived in a state of intimate communion with God. They were, however, forbidden by God to eat of the fruit of "the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil." According to Jewish tradition (see Knowledge of the Heart, by Moses Chayim Luzzato), this prohibition was to give them free choice and allow them to earn, as opposed to receive, absolute perfection and intimate communion with God, a higher level than the one on which they were created.
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Terry
I have a lot to say about Original Sin. But, I'll not go into all of it.
They didn't kill anybody. They didn't end the life of anyone or anything unless you consider biting a fruit attempt fruiticide!
The worst you can accuse them of is trespass and theft.
For this a crime has been committed?
Who pressed charges and were there any mitigating circumstances?
The garden had been given as a gift to Adam and Eve and yet, in the middle of this gift we have one plant (tree of life) reserved as "off limits". So, the worst thing you could do is tresspass and carry off a bite or two. That is the worst!
What possible motive for a crime so petty? As it is written: they wanted to be LIKE GOD. This entailed gaining knowledge of what is "good" and what is "bad".
The pursuit of knowledge is the motive.
Why is the pursuit of knowledge worth pressing charges?
Secondly, wanting to be LIKE GOD is there too. Why is wanting to be like the most perfect of all living beings who also happens to be your father considered wrong?
You see, the pettiness of this "crime" is dwarfed by the mitigating circumstance of the two naive people desiring equality and knowledge.
Are there any worse crimes possible than a desire for knowledge and equality?
If you are this all-powerful creator God, no.
Why?
Obedience trumps everything; even benign motives.
Since Adam and Eve's crime did not entail killing anything or shedding blood (just some fruit julice!) a balanced view would say the way they should pay for such a crime would be something less than death for them.
The two, so we are told, were warned about the death penalty and we are to assume they would know what "death" meant.
Crime: theft, disobedience, tresspass.
Penalty: Death.
You can call this fair and equitable justice if you desire. But, so far, none of this involves holding generation after generation of offspring WORTHY OF DEATH.
This is the puzzle of the doctrine of Original Sin. How is holding children accountable for the tresspass of their parents considered "just"?
Well, it isn't.
Justice is getting what you deserve. Injustice is getting what you don't deserve. How did Adam and Eve's offspring DESERVE death when they themselves did not tresspass?
This is where the fertile imagination of St.Augustine comes into play. It is he who invented the whimsical notion that children are born worthy of death! And this was in a time and place in history when it was believed (superstitiously) that a child could be marked by something a parent had seen or heard or done. In other words: pure imagination and lack of knowledge of genes or the mechanism of inheritance.
To make Jesus' death meaningful in a broad sense, Paul had attributed Adam's sin to a price paid by Jesus. LOGICALLY IT MAKES NO SENSE!
God is the one who complained about the injury to his "property" in Eden by the tresspass of humans. The only redemption possible would be the human's paying it. Instead, God himself pays his own price of redemption by sending his own property, his son. It isn't equitable at all. Calling it "grace" or "UNDESERVED kindness" demonstrates the awareness that it satisfies no LOGICAL basis at all.
If humanity did NOT DESERVE to be forgiven; it violates JUSTICE.
God is not Just if he does not practice JUSTICE!
The doctrine of redemption by the death of Jesus is, therefore, not only illogical, unjust and unfair; it is inexplicable to this very day!
The fact the Catholic Church merely INSISTED it was so should not carry much weight TODAY!
Don't we know better by now?
Apparently not.
T.
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Narkissos
What Tetra wrote about Darwin made me think of Freud.
On the one hand, it could be said that the "invention of the unconscious" shatters the classical doctrine of original sin. Certainly the "genetic" explanation of Augustine is overcome.
On the other hand, it opens the possibility of a fresh interpretation of "original sin," in terms of language and culture. There is an inheritance, a baggage we must deal with as our own although we didn't make it in the first place.
And when Terry says:
this was in a time and place in history when it was believed (superstitiously) that a child could be marked by something a parent had seen or heard or done.
I can't help hearing an echo of what psychoanalysis has led us to believe (perhaps superstitiously too?) in our own "time and place in history". -
tetrapod.sapien
On the other hand, it opens the possibility of a fresh interpretation of "original sin," in terms of language and culture. There is an inheritance, a baggage we must deal with as our own although we didn't make it in the first place.
Narkissos,
yes. independence via technology and ideas too.
or maybe junk DNA. other bacterial genomes hitching a ride in ours through symbiotic merger. or large chunks of "erroneous" genome due to copying error.
...but then that would make the perfect human a single celled organism, so i think your idea of culture and memes is better.
TS