On Sep 22, 2:17 pm, Alan Wostenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sep 20, 7:46 pm, Deidzoeb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:> > > > Original Sin
> is the one Christian
> > > > > dogma anybody can verify for himself: read the daily headlines.
>
> > > > Is it memetic or genetic?
>
> > > I'd say genetic is to original sin as memetic is to personal sin.
>
> > Original Sin depends on the premise that the Bible or Christian
> > teachings have a reasonable or proper standard of morality. The fact
> > that people can't live up to the unattainable standards of the Bible
> > doesn't prove that the Bible is the objective standard of morality. It
> > just begs the question of whether the Bible's standards of morality
> > are right.
>
> Since you don't accept the Bible as inspired, I'd recommend you forget
> it for the moment. \The idea -- Chesterton's I think -- is we can
> infer from reason alone, with no appeal to Scripture, that the race
> fell from a state of original justice in the dim past, to our present
> situation. Just read the daily headlines.
I disagree with that from two standpoints. For one thing, we have to
agree on what constitutes sin before we diagnose everyone as sinners
based on daily headlines. If we don't agree on some general or
specifice denomination of Christianity for our shared moral system,
then we have no basis for comparison. The non-Christian may judge that
all morality is subjective, so people who break your rules may not be
breaking their own rules.
Second, even if we shared the same moral system, wouldn't we have to
see sins being committed by everyone at some point in their lives to
conclude that we're all born as sinners? A stereotype of headlines
might tell us that there are many people sinning today, or that some
people commit heinous sins. It doesn't indicate that all humans are
now sinning.
I don't see the line of reasoning that would assume humans were ever
in a collective state of justice that we have moved away from. In fact
there's an amusing and/or sad book that everyone ought to read, the
Pessimist's Guide to History. It's a long, brief timeline of
catastrophes, massacres, wars, natural disasters, plagues, etc.
Whenever I hear people say that recent events or wars or natural
disasters have increased and it's a sign of the endtimes, I tell them
to read Pessimist's Guide to History so they can recalibrate their
assumptions. People may not remember a catastrophe in their lifetimes
as devastating as the tsunami a few years ago or Hurricane Katrina in
the US, but after you read about those kinds of natural disasters
happening every decade or two, many of them worse by orders of
magnitude, you begin to see that we haven't experienced disasters or
wars or massacres worse than some others in our known history. We
probably haven't witnessed rates or levels of "sin" worse than in our
past either.
Maybe the archetypal, maybe instinctual view that things must have
been better in the past comes from the same instinct we all have to
say nothing is good today as it was in the Good Ol' Days, some period
during our own lives. The songs of your teens seemed so much cooler
than music today, books and movies that you saw in your twenties
seemed so much more profound and important than things these days.
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