I Didn't Want To! Sin Made Me Do it!

One of the ways to discover how really old our dogmatic religions are is to ponder the curious concept of original sin. It’s root is in Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 5, Verse 12: “Well then, sin entered the world through one man, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned” (Jerusalem Bible). That death “entered the world” is linked back to Genesis chapter 3, where the event of Adam and Eve’s disobedience is told, and where, in verse 19, we’re told that one consequence of it is “return to the soil.”

The curious aspect of this view is not the rather straightforward observation that people are capable of wickedness, but that one man brought all this about. Thus it is involuntary for Adam’s descendants, never mind the tortured justification of our voluntary participation in the original disobedience that the Catholic Encyclopedia uses, quoting and summarizing Augustine here (see subtitle “How voluntary.” The pertinent quote follows at the tail of this post). In Paul sin and death are linked. Later successive councils and theologians have dug a deep trench to separate the two; not Paul. Bodies die. Indeed, in the same letter to the Romans, 7:14-24, Paul manages to elaborate the linkage by blaming the body for sin; sin is in the body. Therefore “When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me.”

There are some genuinely valuable insights in those verses in Chapter 7, not least a well-observed tension between at least two levels of consciousness that often tend to be in conflict. Worth reading; a link is here. Too bad that concepts like divine revelation have frozen this testimony and its interpretation—and the foregoing presentation of original sin—into a kind of untouchable fossil unquestioned acceptance of which has led to multiple dicta by church councils and countless theological explanations.

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Here from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

It is this law of solidarity, admitted by common sentiment, which attributes to children a part of the shame resulting from the father's crime. It is not a personal crime, objected the Pelasgians. “No", answered St. Augustine, “but it is paternal crime” (Op. imperf., I, cxlviii). Being a distinct person I am not strictly responsible for the crime of another; the act is not mine. Yet, as a member of the human family, I am supposed to have acted with its head who represented it with regard to the conservation or the loss of grace. I am, therefore, responsible for my privation of grace, taking responsibility in the largest sense of the word. This, however, is enough to make the state of privation of grace in a certain degree voluntary, and, therefore, “without absurdity it may be said to be voluntary” (St. Augustine, “Retract.”, I, xiii).

As a member of the human family I am supposed to have acted with its head? Before being born? Without absurdity? Come again?

I’m not saying that something like “the Fall” didn’t take place; no; but that above is just one hypothesis.