Original Sin

[Helios]

Such is the case of the born-again Christian, refusing to partake in the sensuality he once enjoyed, declaring it evil, and focusing instead on the visions of his mind, declaring them real.

I am curious about this alternative that I have allegedly resorted to; "visions of his mind" might be a phrase in need of defining.

The born-again Christian is another matter. He has accepted the words of others, believing that they are capable of some sort of understanding or higher reason of which he is deprived. Accepting Original Sin with the rest of the doctrine, he is dunked underwater. He intentionally drowns the only part of him that is real: the belief that his own conclusions are valid, the belief that he is worth more than the sum of his molecular parts. He renounces his self. He proclaims that he is not. He forfeits. His autonomy chokes and gasps for air as he surrenders both his right to think and his right to feel, and he arises from the water a collection of muscles, veins, blood, organs, and nothing more, by choice. His suicide has occured, and the physical death that eventually follows is not half as tragic.

I find it difficult to understand your point, as it is being obscured by the magniloquence of your prose. From what I can surmise, however, you are claiming that Christianity encourages the abandonment of reasoned thought and the adoption of asceticism. I do not find it encourages either, and am interested in what you might adduce to demonstrate that it does encourage the foregoing.

 

[Totenkindly]

Original sin, according to Christian theology, is humanity's natural state of sin. After the Fall of Man, when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, all of his ancestors bear the consequence. It is a belief that evil is a fundamental underpinning of the human psyche, which is to say that the one thing that separates man from any other mass of molecules, his mind, is tainted, so his entire existence is abominable. If Original Sin is abandoned, so is the necessity of a savior. There is no savior for a man who is not damned.

Agreed. In fact, I feel that Original Sin was mandatory if one starts with the supposition that Jesus had to be a savior. If not everyone is a sinner, then there is no need to be saved; and a god who would hand over his child to be murdered for people who don't need to be saved would be considered a monster.

I can say with certainty, though I base this claim on no fact, that the majority of Christians have been so since their birth. A child has no concept of what is and is not real, so he may be deluded at a young age, his reason marred, and suffer a deformed existence of the most hideous kind without pain. For the blind, the inability to see their own dead, milky cataracts is a boon. Those with sight shudder at the lurid sight of the worn, decayed eyes, and pity that they are not being used, though the blind do not ask this of them. Everyone in the room considers the blind man's disability as he stumbles helplessly, but he is so used to his own mode of perception that his own blindness is far from his mind.

This is a bit over the top, simply because the language you are using is so strong as to rival the language I despise hearing from Christians in regards to judging others.

I understand why you're having such a strong response if Christianity has dissed you for a long time in life, so maybe you need to get it out of your system, but I'm not much for this level of casting the other side as tortuously blind. Usually both sides have some degree of blindness and vision.

A man born blind does not understand his deficiency as clearly as a man who has poked out his own eyes, because the latter always knows that there is another world, one of color in fact, that he was a part of once, that he has left. He made the choice to deny the sensual reality that he was once a part of, opting instead to pay attention to and place importance on the visions in his mind. He has not altered reality, only his perception of it. Such is the case of the born-again Christian, refusing to partake in the sensuality he once enjoyed, declaring it evil, and focusing instead on the visions of his mind, declaring them real.

Again, everyone is different. We should know this, considering we are on a typology site. We all see things differently, and some of this is inherent to personhood.

Which means some of us act autonomously to a fault, and others need some sort of external structure in order to keep our lives stable. religion often provides that stability, and I've seen some pretty screwed-up people find stability and become responsible, hard-working, committed human beings because of the faith they invested in.

So to me, the fault here is in:

• Dissing the structural discipline/benefits of religion without understanding that these benefits are quite positive in the individual lives of some people
• thinking that what worked for one person will be best for another, which is what religious people tend to do ("Jesus changed my life!! he can fix yours too -- and should!!!")

The man who has been a Christian since childhood's reality has been so fractured that I would not expect him to be able to piece it back together. He earns my pity, and even some of my forgiveness. The born-again Christian is another matter. He has accepted the words of others, believing that they are capable of some sort of understanding or higher reason of which he is deprived. Accepting Original Sin with the rest of the doctrine, he is dunked underwater. He intentionally drowns the only part of him that is real: the belief that his own conclusions are valid, the belief that he is worth more than the sum of his molecular parts. He renounces his self. He proclaims that he is not. He forfeits. His autonomy chokes and gasps for air as he surrenders both his right to think and his right to feel, and he arises from the water a collection of muscles, veins, blood, organs, and nothing more, by choice. His suicide has occured, and the physical death that eventually follows is not half as tragic.

Again I agree perhaps with the essence of the extremity of your case, if you're going to view this as a matter of personal autonomy and assume someone has sold themselves out to fit a particular religious system... but it's probably far too much for the "average" person of religious persuasion. There are many reasons someone would seek to believe, and there are many positives and negatives here to be balanced against each other rather than just the one facet (intellectual autonomy) that you seem focused on.

Who was this 'Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil' created for? Was it created on the off-chance that a giraffe, tall enough to reach its ripe fruit, may obtain this knowledge?

I've heard it was a banana, although maybe a strawberry would have been more fair in terms of being reachable by more people regardless of age.

Is there a chance that Adam and Eve would have ignored this Tree, in favor of the fruit on the many other trees in the garden, if god had abstained from indicating this particular Tree? And if man, with his innate curiousity, had not yet fallen, then can he be blamed for the decision he made to eat from it? The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a trap.

My opinion: It was just a story, to try to explain why people went bad. It doesn't have to make sense, and trying to make logical sense of it will confuse the issue.

interestingly, I've seen many Jewish teachers look at the eating of the fruit as a positive and something God wanted people to do, in order to acquire knowledge and be responsible for our actions and be more like God.

That's what's funny about Jewish vs Christian tradition: It seems like Christians are much more binary about things ("My idea is right, yours is wrong") whereas the Jews often have different teachers and schools of thought and expect them all to engage each other in spirited discourse.

 

[garbage]

1. I'm not concerned with the rush of happiness the arsonist feels when he throws the coctail. I'm not concerned with the ease of life a kidnapper acquires through ransom. I'm not concerned with the glints of good that are visible within mountains of corruption.

In all of these metaphorical cases, then, you're being intellectually dishonest. They're factors that need to be.. well, factored in, regardless of whether or not you like the end result.

 

[Feops]

A story that teaches that knowledge is sin, and ignorance divine, has no place in a world of higher thinking.

 

[Not_Me]

How come people always attack Christianity - and not, say, Hinudism, Buddhism, or Wicca?

In the Western world, Christianity is the only religion with enough following to be able to impose its values on non-believers.

 

[iwakar]

My personal experience with the inherent sins of guidance.

My parents were just teenagers when they had me. So... my devoutly Pentecostal grandmother, who had her own history of errors, was determined to have a significant hand in my upbringing. Copious church activities, speaking in "tongues", morning & evening bible readings --this was my life. A life seen through lenses colored by the conclusions of others.

But then came the fighting, the infidelity, the divorce, my father's new life that did not include us, the moves, the general turbulence too private to share, and always the abuse... and I tumbled down the rabbit hole. I was so angry, bitter, and death-obsessed that I forgot I was just sad. I ran away from home to figure out what it should be made of and I was gone for many years. I thought for a long time that it was an unsolvable problem, the tragedy of my life that I would never recover from. But my miserable childhood was the pit of ashes I needed to burn off the alien cataracts. It was the most significant event of my life to date and I was so young. It precipitated a life-long metamorphosis. How fortunate I was for that rite of passage!

And how grateful I am too for my grandmother, who loved me enough to care about my vision of the world --who fitted me with the best lenses she had to offer. I outgrew her conclusions, but never her love or its intentions. I'm agnostic: she is Christian, but her journey will be as fraught with difficulty and uncertainty as mine. I hope my grandchildren will grant me the same patience and tolerance when they have outgrown the lessons I have to offer.

We're all in various stages of transformation and I find it hypocritical to condemn or promote the inevitable plateaus or necessary conclusions we all reach. But I promise to endeavor to be as patient with your state of evolution as you are with mine.

Now the only conclusions I wrestle with are my own.