I’m Sorry I’m Alive: Part IV – Don’t Want to Hear Your Ancient History

Christianity is the only modern religion to have a doctrine like Original Sin, with a primitive ancestor being the cause of human nature. In other religions, such as Judaism and Buddhism, the world is the twister, a broken place wherein humanity must do their best with their free will. In Judaism, free will should be exercised as one of God’s chosen people to benefit all mankind, while in Buddhism it is used to ease the suffering of all living beings. Christianity adds other rules to the playing field. Free will should be exercised to benefit all beings. However, this will be problematic because of man’s sinful nature. Yet, this should not hinder man, for if it does, man will not reap the benefits of God’s kingdom, the reward of the afterlife. All of these religions attempt to explain suffering. What is relatively unknown, and not taught in today’s churches, is how Christianity developed the concept of Original Sin. It is not rooted in the Old Testament. You’ll find it nowhere in the Adam and Eve story. Instead, the Fall of Man originates in a difference of philosophical opinion between ancient Christianity and Gnosticism.

            Gnosticism is a complicated, mostly because its ancient texts and practices were destroyed or hidden after Christianity’s established dominance. Here’s the short version—a Creator God made the world, while lesser gods conceived its operation. Because of this creation by committee, the world is a broken, evil place, filled with suffering and death. Man, whose soul is divine, moves through it of his own will, yet sometimes this broken world causes him to act evil. His hand is forced. Early Christian clergy had problems with this philosophy. First, it did not recognize Jesus Christ as man’s redeemer. Second, it let man off the hook for his own reprehensible actions. Bishop of Lyon Irenaeus, part of the Roman Gaul clergy, developed Original Sin as a method to counter these Gnostic beliefs. In Irenaeus’ view, Adam should be held at fault. Notice how this does not condemn Eve, as later church doctrine would. Because of Adam’s original sin, and since mankind is born through Adam’s seed, all of us have propensity to sin. Because we battle temptation, and often cannot overcome it, we are slaves to our weak, sinful natures.

            This view was countered by Christian apologists, who maintained that with free will no one is enslaved to sin. They have choice. Even if one lives a righteous, sinless life, one does not enter the afterlife with one strike, original sin, already against them.

            In the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo made original sin more depraved. He added that since Adam is present in all mankind, mankind was present during the Fall of Man. Thus, we all inherit Adam’s guilt for having defied God. Augustine also surmised that sex is the vessel which passes original sin. The more children you have, the more you are making little sinners. Mankind’s will then becomes weakened, but not destroyed, and mankind itself becomes a sort of wayward crowd who never sees the path to heaven. Of interest is the Mormon Church’s view of this. It recognizes the inherit contradiction in telling your creations to be fruitful and multiply, while thinking that such an action is in itself sinful.

            Original sin’s philosophy was batted about for centuries within Christianity. In Catholicism, baptism washed it away. Children who died before baptism went to purgatory, a heinous lie which only now the Church admits to inventing. Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin were more extreme. You could not “wash away” original sin. You were condemned to it throughout life and thus should feel a strong sense of guilt for your own nature, as if somehow that accounted for all the worldly atrocities that came before you. Old world orthodox countered the Protestant idea. It says no one inherits guilt from anyone. Mankind only inherited a fallen nature, not guilt or damnation.

            All of these ideas merely try to explain suffering and answer the question, “Why does mankind act the way it does?” It is a good question. It is an important question. The problem, as I’ve said, is basing it in Adam and Eve, who by their very definition, did not know the divine rules they were breaking on the scale which God judges them. It’d be like kicking your three-year old out of the house because it took a dollar from your wallet. If you have not explained stealing, money, or respecting another’s property, how can you expect the punishment to suffice or even stop the behavior? Original Sin is an abhorrent doctrine that uses to a time that did not exist to explain an action that did not exist to explain a world that does exist. 

To use Adam and Eve as metaphor is fine, if done correctly, but it is a crime when done to make people, especially children, feel as if they are broken, sinful vessels without the power to change the fundamental core of their natures. Such ancient thought, and ancient history, has no place in the modern world, but only as a teaching tool to show how far man has come in its ideas in the last two-thousand years.