Yin...
The "original sin" bit that is an insult to my intelegence!!
How the hell can a baby be sinful?, because he came to be from desire, love, sex?
Original Sin: Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as imposible 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 imcomprehensible design or any passser-by whose roting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him--it 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 unintellegible 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 neither be good or evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin a fact not open to his choice 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 quilty in a matter where no innoncense 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 evansion 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 responsiblity and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendence is of 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 quilt 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 knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational beign. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral beign. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire--he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinals values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is design to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his quilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not man.
Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their own standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His quilt, they charge, is that he lives.
Ayn Rand
Explain then to me after reading above, and comprehending it. Without taken sentences out of context, that your god, is a benevolent, creature?.
If the words are true, (that god created man in his own image.) and god is perfect, but we are not. Then we are not created by his image. Your god is a liar!. Religion is only a remnant of the bicameral mind. (evolve!)
Godless.
