Why there is no sin
Or, sex is fun. And holy.
from 
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JoeUser Forums
There is no such thing as original sin. There is no such thing as 'sin' at all.
Original sin as sexual sin began life with the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential Christian writers and thinkers in the history of the Church. Augustine was not always a Christian. He was a convert from Manicheanism, and before his fascination with Dualism took hold he had been, by his own confession, a drunkard and a general debauchee, possessed by a rabid appetite for sex.
What he so eagerly enjoyed in his youth he was to deny to others in his later life, being tormented by guilt - or, as he put it, having repented of his 'sin'. Augustine is the principal originator of the doctrine of Original Sin as a sexually transmitted disease of the Spirit, a doctrine to be found in his greatest work 'The City of God'.
The Christians will tell you that sin is as much a physical as a spiritual reality. But if the source of sin is in the Spirit it can have no effect on the body; and if it originates in the body it can have no effect upon the Spirit, because the two are totally different in nature. Spirit is immortal and perfect; material reality, including the body, is fallible, subject to decay, and transitory. Original sin, as an idea, is equivalent to the statement "That apple is diseased, so these elephants will get sick." Not merely nonsense - but nonsense on stilts and turning cartwheels.
However, the fact that Original Sin is nonsense in itself hasn't had any adverse effect on its popularity as a staple of Christian doctrine and belief. It's also proved remarkably effective as a tool for controlling the behaviour of the believer. Once granted as a basic premise of faith, it's a perfectly serviceable argument to use in order to explain that sense of dissatisfaction and unhappines, that vague sense of malaise and discomfort we all feel, simply as a consequence of being born human in a human world. We all feel that things aren't right. That there's something wrong, somewhere. This faint sense of existential angst was the premise of Neo's search for the Matrix, of Faust's desire for 'unholy' knowledge, of the the alchemical search for the Philosopher's Stone (which had nothing to do with turning physical lead into physical gold, and everything to do with the transmutation of the human condition).
In order to exploit it you have to be able to explain it. And once you have, you have the ground for the Doctrine of Salvation and Damnation, for the hope of Heaven and the fear of Hell, and for all the opportunities for the exercise of power that come from the authentic belief that you (the family priest, the Church) control the eternal destiny of the believer. And the more things there are that constitute grounds for damnation, then the more opportunities there are for the exercise of that power.
Just as the canon of books that constitute the Bible did not fall ready-made made from Heaven but was constructed by men (primarily at the Council of Nicaea) so the idea of sin was constructed over time. Sexual sin in particular was constucted against the mores and sexual practices of the ancient Middle East, which were used by the early Fathers of the Church as standards to define what Christianity was not. It's always easier to say what a thing isn't than what it is. Augustine, womanizing hypocrite and drunkard that he was, took his own life and used his new-found standard of sin (everything he had done previously) and used it to define a new standard of Godliness and righteousness (everything he had not done previously - particularly in relation to sex). But so great was the spiritual paranoia induced by the history of his personal sexual adventures, as well as by his former devotion to heathen religious practices, that he had to find a ground for the 'corruption' of human nature (all of humanity had to be corrupt, because otherwise Augustine would have had to face an angry God alone) - so that this corruption had to be universal in nature - as well as a means of ensuring that every human being had by necessity to participate in that corruption.
The only possible contender is sex. And birth the perfect means of transmission. We're all created as the consequence of a sexual act, and everyone reading this was born of a woman. And because sex and birth come together in the bodies of women, women have always been condemned by both Augustine and the Church as the carriers of sin. Women, said Augustine, were the Devil's gateway.
If you look carefully into what's known of religio-sexual practice in the ancient Middle East (which included Temple prostitutes of both sexes as well as a whole host of sexual acts performed both openly and privately that most Americans regard with sickly prurience to this day) and then compare those practices to the sexual mores of contemporary American Christianity, you'll find every one of these formerly holy acts to be subject to condemnation.
Sin, and sexual sin in particular, were born out of two complimentary impulses: fear, and the desire to control others. It's no more a sin for two adult males to engage in sex than it is for two adult females, or for an adult man and an adult woman. So far is it from being 'sinful', that these types of acts have been practiced as holy rituals across human cultures and throughout human history.
Sin, far from being an act or acts subject to Divine punishment, is in fact an act or acts which are subject to the punishment of men, at the behest of those in Authority, using God as their justification and accomplice.
None of which is to say that there is no such thing as wrong-doing. From our days in the schoolyard, all of us know that some things are simply wrong. Ask any child, and he or she will tell you that snitching is wrong. They can't tell you why it's wrong, but they know that it is. They know that breaking a promise is wrong; they know that maliciously harming another is wrong. In other words, they know that it's wrong to break the bonds of personal trust and communal fidelity. Being children they can't put the issue in such terms, but they understand the principle - as do we all.
They know this because each of us has a conscience that doesn't depend for its integrity and meaning on religious revelation. Such principles form 'the Rules', with which every child is intimately familiar without any need for instruction by an adult, a priest, or any other intermediary. Conscience is formed in part by the mores of the community, and in part by the practice and example of parents. And any man could live at peace with himself and his neighbours if he simply followed the dictates of his own conscience.
Sin, however, is something distinct from this generalized sense of wrong-doing that we all share. Sin is wrong-doing flavored with religion. In order to say what I actually mean, I'm now going to have to introduce a couple of technical philosophical terms. The first of these is 'ontology'. Ontology is that branch of philosophy that tries to determine what makes a thing the thing that it is. What constitutes the 'horsiness' of a horse? What constitutes the 'grassiness' of a blade of grass? What constitutes the manliness of a man, or the womanliness of a woman, or the humanity of a human being? What are the first principles of being a particular thing that makes that thing the thing that it is?
And the second of these terms is 'teleology'. If ontology looks at first principles in relation to things, teleology looks at the processes by which those first principles operate. By what process does the 'horsiness' of a horse lead to the full expression of that principle in the adult horse? What processes are at work in the development of the child into the adult man or woman? But teleology and ontology are not random, as evolution is. A teleological view of the horse does not permit the idea that the horse as we know it today was ever any other type of creature than a horse. Early horses may have been less perfect horses than those of today - but they were never anything other than horses.
As Thomas Aquinas showed in his great work the Summa these ideas, first developed by the ancient Greeks, are not incompatible with the Christian doctrine of the soul as the animating force that gives life to matter, to flesh. Teleology, which is developmental in nature, shows that there is a principle at work in the flesh that leads to greater and greater sophistication and refinement. Ontology shows that this principle of development is not a part of the flesh itself but derives from something greater than and independent of the flesh - which in the Christian mythology is the soul.
What Augustine did was to argue that, through the Fall, both the soul and the body had become sick with the sickness of pride, with a delusion of self-sufficiency, and that this sickness, contaminating soul and body alike, was transmitted through the mechanism of sex. Why sex? Remember, Augustine had been a pagan, had made use of Temple prostitutes, had participated in rituals in which sex becomes the vehicle of communion with the Gods, is a sacrament in itself.
Whether he knew it or not, sex retained for Augustine a profound spiritual component - but a component through which 'false' gods, 'demons', now made themselves manifest. Sex, obviously, was the primordial means by which the nature of God (the imago dei) was imprinted upon the mind and body of the human being. And sex, therefore, was essentially sinful. And not merely sinful but the worst of all possible sins because the most perilous. As he was all too well aware, being himself a sexual sinner of (in his own mind) the worst sort, sex lead straight to Hell. And sex of the kind practiced in the Temples with which he was familiar, homosexual sex, promiscuous sex, ritual sex, was the worst of the worst of all possible sins.
Which is why Christians are so terrified of, fascinated by, and repulsed by, unregulated sex - especially unregulated sex that doesn't conform to what they consider to be 'natural'. Why other behaviours which, according to the school-yard code of 'the Rules' are far more damaging to the integrity of the individual and the cohesion of the community, go unregarded and unremarked.
It's wrong to tolerate poverty when you have more than you need. It's wrong to tolerate unfairness, prejudice, and greed. It's wrong to bear false witness. It's wrong to allow the weak to be subject to the arbitrary tyrrany of the strong.
But those things are not sins. They're just wrong.
The notion that there are sins for which we will be punished after death is at once hysterically funny (how much attention do you pay to the social interaction of the ant colony in your yard?) and an instrument of social, personal, and political oppression that has served the powerful well for two thousand years.
There is no such thing as sin. 'Sin' is the construction of those who wish to determine the course of your life so that it, your life, serves their interests and not yours. There is, however, wrong-doing. The sooner you realize the difference the less you will fear death, and the more free you will be.
The gods are dead (may they live forever) and only we remain. And the sooner we know it the happier we will be.
Original sin as sexual sin began life with the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential Christian writers and thinkers in the history of the Church. Augustine was not always a Christian. He was a convert from Manicheanism, and before his fascination with Dualism took hold he had been, by his own confession, a drunkard and a general debauchee, possessed by a rabid appetite for sex.
What he so eagerly enjoyed in his youth he was to deny to others in his later life, being tormented by guilt - or, as he put it, having repented of his 'sin'. Augustine is the principal originator of the doctrine of Original Sin as a sexually transmitted disease of the Spirit, a doctrine to be found in his greatest work 'The City of God'.
The Christians will tell you that sin is as much a physical as a spiritual reality. But if the source of sin is in the Spirit it can have no effect on the body; and if it originates in the body it can have no effect upon the Spirit, because the two are totally different in nature. Spirit is immortal and perfect; material reality, including the body, is fallible, subject to decay, and transitory. Original sin, as an idea, is equivalent to the statement "That apple is diseased, so these elephants will get sick." Not merely nonsense - but nonsense on stilts and turning cartwheels.
However, the fact that Original Sin is nonsense in itself hasn't had any adverse effect on its popularity as a staple of Christian doctrine and belief. It's also proved remarkably effective as a tool for controlling the behaviour of the believer. Once granted as a basic premise of faith, it's a perfectly serviceable argument to use in order to explain that sense of dissatisfaction and unhappines, that vague sense of malaise and discomfort we all feel, simply as a consequence of being born human in a human world. We all feel that things aren't right. That there's something wrong, somewhere. This faint sense of existential angst was the premise of Neo's search for the Matrix, of Faust's desire for 'unholy' knowledge, of the the alchemical search for the Philosopher's Stone (which had nothing to do with turning physical lead into physical gold, and everything to do with the transmutation of the human condition).
In order to exploit it you have to be able to explain it. And once you have, you have the ground for the Doctrine of Salvation and Damnation, for the hope of Heaven and the fear of Hell, and for all the opportunities for the exercise of power that come from the authentic belief that you (the family priest, the Church) control the eternal destiny of the believer. And the more things there are that constitute grounds for damnation, then the more opportunities there are for the exercise of that power.
Just as the canon of books that constitute the Bible did not fall ready-made made from Heaven but was constructed by men (primarily at the Council of Nicaea) so the idea of sin was constructed over time. Sexual sin in particular was constucted against the mores and sexual practices of the ancient Middle East, which were used by the early Fathers of the Church as standards to define what Christianity was not. It's always easier to say what a thing isn't than what it is. Augustine, womanizing hypocrite and drunkard that he was, took his own life and used his new-found standard of sin (everything he had done previously) and used it to define a new standard of Godliness and righteousness (everything he had not done previously - particularly in relation to sex). But so great was the spiritual paranoia induced by the history of his personal sexual adventures, as well as by his former devotion to heathen religious practices, that he had to find a ground for the 'corruption' of human nature (all of humanity had to be corrupt, because otherwise Augustine would have had to face an angry God alone) - so that this corruption had to be universal in nature - as well as a means of ensuring that every human being had by necessity to participate in that corruption.
The only possible contender is sex. And birth the perfect means of transmission. We're all created as the consequence of a sexual act, and everyone reading this was born of a woman. And because sex and birth come together in the bodies of women, women have always been condemned by both Augustine and the Church as the carriers of sin. Women, said Augustine, were the Devil's gateway.
If you look carefully into what's known of religio-sexual practice in the ancient Middle East (which included Temple prostitutes of both sexes as well as a whole host of sexual acts performed both openly and privately that most Americans regard with sickly prurience to this day) and then compare those practices to the sexual mores of contemporary American Christianity, you'll find every one of these formerly holy acts to be subject to condemnation.
Sin, and sexual sin in particular, were born out of two complimentary impulses: fear, and the desire to control others. It's no more a sin for two adult males to engage in sex than it is for two adult females, or for an adult man and an adult woman. So far is it from being 'sinful', that these types of acts have been practiced as holy rituals across human cultures and throughout human history.
Sin, far from being an act or acts subject to Divine punishment, is in fact an act or acts which are subject to the punishment of men, at the behest of those in Authority, using God as their justification and accomplice.
None of which is to say that there is no such thing as wrong-doing. From our days in the schoolyard, all of us know that some things are simply wrong. Ask any child, and he or she will tell you that snitching is wrong. They can't tell you why it's wrong, but they know that it is. They know that breaking a promise is wrong; they know that maliciously harming another is wrong. In other words, they know that it's wrong to break the bonds of personal trust and communal fidelity. Being children they can't put the issue in such terms, but they understand the principle - as do we all.
They know this because each of us has a conscience that doesn't depend for its integrity and meaning on religious revelation. Such principles form 'the Rules', with which every child is intimately familiar without any need for instruction by an adult, a priest, or any other intermediary. Conscience is formed in part by the mores of the community, and in part by the practice and example of parents. And any man could live at peace with himself and his neighbours if he simply followed the dictates of his own conscience.
Sin, however, is something distinct from this generalized sense of wrong-doing that we all share. Sin is wrong-doing flavored with religion. In order to say what I actually mean, I'm now going to have to introduce a couple of technical philosophical terms. The first of these is 'ontology'. Ontology is that branch of philosophy that tries to determine what makes a thing the thing that it is. What constitutes the 'horsiness' of a horse? What constitutes the 'grassiness' of a blade of grass? What constitutes the manliness of a man, or the womanliness of a woman, or the humanity of a human being? What are the first principles of being a particular thing that makes that thing the thing that it is?
And the second of these terms is 'teleology'. If ontology looks at first principles in relation to things, teleology looks at the processes by which those first principles operate. By what process does the 'horsiness' of a horse lead to the full expression of that principle in the adult horse? What processes are at work in the development of the child into the adult man or woman? But teleology and ontology are not random, as evolution is. A teleological view of the horse does not permit the idea that the horse as we know it today was ever any other type of creature than a horse. Early horses may have been less perfect horses than those of today - but they were never anything other than horses.
As Thomas Aquinas showed in his great work the Summa these ideas, first developed by the ancient Greeks, are not incompatible with the Christian doctrine of the soul as the animating force that gives life to matter, to flesh. Teleology, which is developmental in nature, shows that there is a principle at work in the flesh that leads to greater and greater sophistication and refinement. Ontology shows that this principle of development is not a part of the flesh itself but derives from something greater than and independent of the flesh - which in the Christian mythology is the soul.
What Augustine did was to argue that, through the Fall, both the soul and the body had become sick with the sickness of pride, with a delusion of self-sufficiency, and that this sickness, contaminating soul and body alike, was transmitted through the mechanism of sex. Why sex? Remember, Augustine had been a pagan, had made use of Temple prostitutes, had participated in rituals in which sex becomes the vehicle of communion with the Gods, is a sacrament in itself.
Whether he knew it or not, sex retained for Augustine a profound spiritual component - but a component through which 'false' gods, 'demons', now made themselves manifest. Sex, obviously, was the primordial means by which the nature of God (the imago dei) was imprinted upon the mind and body of the human being. And sex, therefore, was essentially sinful. And not merely sinful but the worst of all possible sins because the most perilous. As he was all too well aware, being himself a sexual sinner of (in his own mind) the worst sort, sex lead straight to Hell. And sex of the kind practiced in the Temples with which he was familiar, homosexual sex, promiscuous sex, ritual sex, was the worst of the worst of all possible sins.
Which is why Christians are so terrified of, fascinated by, and repulsed by, unregulated sex - especially unregulated sex that doesn't conform to what they consider to be 'natural'. Why other behaviours which, according to the school-yard code of 'the Rules' are far more damaging to the integrity of the individual and the cohesion of the community, go unregarded and unremarked.
It's wrong to tolerate poverty when you have more than you need. It's wrong to tolerate unfairness, prejudice, and greed. It's wrong to bear false witness. It's wrong to allow the weak to be subject to the arbitrary tyrrany of the strong.
But those things are not sins. They're just wrong.
The notion that there are sins for which we will be punished after death is at once hysterically funny (how much attention do you pay to the social interaction of the ant colony in your yard?) and an instrument of social, personal, and political oppression that has served the powerful well for two thousand years.
There is no such thing as sin. 'Sin' is the construction of those who wish to determine the course of your life so that it, your life, serves their interests and not yours. There is, however, wrong-doing. The sooner you realize the difference the less you will fear death, and the more free you will be.
The gods are dead (may they live forever) and only we remain. And the sooner we know it the happier we will be.
