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WillowOne's Positions

Sin and Original Sin

My Positions

  1. Sin is a theological category, not a moral one. It is wrongdoing defined as offence against a god, and so it includes acts that harm no one and excludes acts that harm many.
  2. Original sin, inherited guilt for an act committed by ancestors who did not exist, is incoherent, unjust by every standard humans have ever used, and necessary only to make the Christian remedy necessary.
  3. The claim that humans are born broken and in need of rescue is a sales technique: diagnose the disease for which you sell the cure.

Notes

  1. Sin and harm come apart in both directions. The catalogue of sins includes blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking, eating the wrong animals, wearing mixed fabrics, same-sex love and private disbelief, none of which has a victim. Meanwhile the same texts regulate slavery, command genocide and permit the sale of daughters, none of which is called sin where it appears (see Biblical Morality). A system of wrongdoing that condemns the harmless and licenses the harmful is not tracking morality; it is tracking obedience. On my account moral claims are about interests and harm (Morality, Moral claims are incomplete assertions), and "sin" is what you get when the interested party is an invisible one.
  2. Original sin is a fifth-century doctrine. It is not in Genesis, which tells a story about disobedience and expulsion and says nothing about inherited guilt. It is not in Judaism, which reads the same text and never drew the conclusion. It was built by Augustine out of a single phrase in Paul (Romans 5:12), against the objections of Pelagius, who thought humans could choose the good and was declared a heretic for it. The Eastern churches never fully accepted it. A doctrine on which the whole necessity of Christ's sacrifice depends was, for the first four hundred years of Christianity, not there.
  3. It requires a literal Adam, and there was none. Population genetics shows that the human lineage has never passed through a bottleneck of two individuals; the effective population was never below several thousand. The Catholic Church accepts evolution and yet still requires belief in a single first couple from whom all humans descend (Humani Generis, 1950), because without them there is no Fall and without the Fall there is nothing to be redeemed from. That is a contradiction it has chosen to live with rather than resolve.
  4. Inherited guilt is rejected by the Bible itself. "The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son" (Ezekiel 18:20). Every legal system humans have devised agrees. The doctrine asks us to accept, for this one case, a principle we would call monstrous anywhere else: that a newborn is guilty, and that if it dies unbaptised its guilt follows it. The Church spent centuries on what happens to such infants, invented Limbo to soften the answer, and in 2007 quietly suggested that Limbo was never official. The infants, presumably, were relieved.
  5. The psychology of the doctrine. Tell a child that its ordinary desires are wicked, that it was born deserving punishment, and that only the institution telling it so can make it clean, and you have a customer for life. The guilt is manufactured, the cure is sold by the manufacturer, and the shame attached to sexuality in particular has done more quantifiable harm than most of the sins it was meant to prevent. This is the same mechanism I describe under Hell: the persistence of the idea is explained by its usefulness, not its truth.

Sources

  • Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione (c. 412), and the canons of the Council of Carthage (418)
  • Pius XII, Humani Generis (1950), paragraph 37, on monogenism
  • International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised (2007)
  • Venema, D. and McKnight, S., Adam and the Genome (2017), on the population-genetic evidence

Also see