Death in Relation to the Creation and Fall

Your myth of a "fall" and the consequent "original sin" is one of the most evil ideas ever to ooze from the minds of your fevered shamans.I do not choose to believe that I am inherently evil, and neither should you.If you apply some logic and forget unreasoned belief for just a second, you might actually learn something. (Unfortunately, belief gets in the way of learning.)Here we have this thought expressed in far better words than I could come up with.—Ayn Rand Lexicon

Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

​

It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon himit does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

​

The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

​

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

​

Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a tendency to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

​

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledgehe acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evilhe became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his laborhe became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desirehe acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joyall the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he wasthat robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without lovehe was not man.

​

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

Not terrified--just so firmly embedded in her myth cycle that she does not, and cannot, see the world around her, and wouldn't believe it if she could.A classic example of the "None is so blind..." line.

Here's the tree of knowledge. Seems something has been lost in the various translations...

You folks keep debating the fine points of theology in this thread without looking at the big picture--it's all made up!Shamanism down through the ages has been a method for controlling people, and making a living without engaging in honest labor.In the spectrum of makers, takers, and fakers, shamans have always had a firm grasp on the latter two. What easier con job than to make most everything sinful and then offer to intercede with the (invisible) offended deities--for a price.I think Heinlein had it right:

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense.

No hate involved.And if you start a thread on Star Wars I'll participate; at least on that thread we'd all realize we were dealing with fiction. ;-)

Where do you get this nonsense????Here's a better take on the matter:

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense.

​

Robert A. Heinlein