Original Sin

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It's not.

Nowhere.

It was made up out of whole cloth.

ruveyn

It's a more logical explanation than "incest was OK for while..."

"Murder wasn't "OK for while", theft was not "OK for a while", lying was not "OK for a while".

So the earth is billions of years old. And the human race already existed as a species for a million years -AND there was a Garden of Eden 6000 years ago?

The Garden of Eden story might be a distorted folk memory of some actual past, but your taking it litereally AND accepting the Darwinian style old earth at the same time?

I think that you're creating more problems then you're solving here.

No it isn't.

And do not mistake the Bible for a historical document. It is nothing of the kind.

ruveyn

There isn't anything wrong with incest really. Culturally it is not acceptable, and biologically we are wired to avoid it most of the time. Inbreeding can be dangerous as the likelihood of double recessive diseases increases dramatically. But there is no moral reason that it would be wrong in a group of people free of diseases like that, which I would assume would be true if the story of god creating adam and eve were true. Why would they have recessive diseases?

So until these recessive diseases started cropping up, there would be no issue with incest in the first generations of humans.


Ps. I don't agree with that whole premise...but given the premise, it only stands to reason they would be disease free for a bit.

If all are directly descended from Adam and Eve, they why aren't we all Jewish? There appears to be an actual gene associated with being "ethnically" Jewish.

http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48937817.html

Studies of genetics, especially that of mitochondrial DNA which passes down the maternal line have revealed the migration and evolution of early humans from Africa to Europe, on to Asia, the Americas etc. Quite fascinating.

Yes, but the Jewish people have a specific gene that others do not. Gentiles have mostly "evolved" DNA now, Jews have mostly "divine" DNA. That's from what I have read, There is a specific African tribe that has the gene too, and were recently accepted as "Jewish".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemba_people

They've even got an Ark of the Covenant! I can't say if it's one of the "real" ones or not.

I gotta say, after hyper's interjection, the atmosphere of meaningful conjecture and out of the box speculation is quite welcome.

To clarify, I do not believe in original sin, but I am willing to bring up my concerns with the idea. I hope these are not taken as too off-topic.

As others have said, original sin is inherited from Adam and Eve.

I don't know. I think in terms of the narrative, the best inference is that this is just a necessity of the plot. So, original sin is needed to be unforgiven because Christ's death needs to address some ongoing issue. After all, Original Sin is not found in Jewish theology, but rather it's found in Christian theology and heavily involves the atonement. However, I do think that arguments preventing an omnipotent God from taking the most direct route won't work, so I agree it seems odd.


I don't think it should. I do think that there are causal pathways why one person's sin will impact you now. I think the problem is that if we include a perfect God, these causal pathways no longer work as good justifications. So, let's say that your dad kills somebody, goes to jail, and you're now left screwed up because of the loss of a father and his actions being a bad role-model. That's a perfectly legitimate causal pathway. The issue is that Adam and Eve both (hypothetically) existed thousands of years ago, and my feeling is over a significant enough period of time, a perfect God could and would have made the offsetting corrections to work on mankind's character such that the original sin would have ceased being a major concern a long time ago and that our current behaviors and fates could be unaffected. After all, God is usually defined as a literal miracle-worker.


Original Sin is a special kind of sin. As JNathanK pointed out, it's really a massive rupture in the workings of the cosmos, not just an ordinary action causing long-term alienation between mankind and God, and even certain curses upon mankind, kind of like a Pandora's box situation. The issue that seems odd is that Eden was SET UP such that an Original Sin could occur, which... I find odd. Many Christians frame this as "choice has to exist" but I don't see this as entailing original sin, AND I think the notion of choice and divine foreknowledge gets pretty tricky, as you have our contingent future decisions impacting God's decisions, which.... kind of reduces the nature of those decisions, we're not really free in making them, but rather God already accounts for what we're going to do.



I don't think so. I think Christianity's handling of sin, both mankind's and the devil's, doesn't really make a lot of sense when cross-examined. I mean, as stories go, this is often fine, as many stories have their own setting issues where the setting has some oddity like this. However, I do think that the model used by Orthodox Christianity doesn't make much sense. I am not sure what other models should be looked into, as I think a lot of changes would have to be made to the theological system to make it work better. (Maybe have God as an imperfect agent?)

Just like the "Chicken crosses the street" joke was original at old time. I guess that eating an apple was "original" back in the day.

Understandable, but the problem ends up being that genetic modification isn't really wrong, and God freely does even more minor miracles. So, I think the OP's concerns on God's love are still valid. After all, if God can miraculously heal a living person, why can't he heal a zygote of original sin? I mean, I do think that if you want to have original sin, you will have a genetic model though, simply because there are all sorts of questions on inheritance otherwise.


Both are questionable though.

With 1) we should expect a population bottleneck of 2 people. This isn't found. http://biologos.org/blog/does-genetics- ... mal-couple
With 2) we have a significant theological problem involving the fates of these other people. Not every garden should be expected to defect. It's odd for ONE garden to be the only one worthy to tell a story about, and within a narrative context this creates a false expectation.(and seems odd given Paul's view of Christ as a second Adam, as a single second Adam doesn't make sense in a theology of multiple Adams) And only having one garden, and a population of ungardened people also is itself odd, and hard to justify, as why not just have EVERYONE in the garden? So, Adam, Eve, Steve, Jane, etc, and let them all sin or NOT sin according to their choices.

I dunno, I don't think Original Sin is a strong framework for this. Instead, I think that evolution makes more sense as a source of negative personal traits. It has it's own theological problems though.

Of course they don't say, Bill....Or at least not openly. Religion is meant to be subtle, and seemingly vague in order to achieve suspension of disbelief. If you're trying to manipulate people and you are OVERT about your true intentions, they're not going to go along with you and will probably make fun of you for it. These seemingly irrational and superstitious ideas that religions promulgate often coincide with motivating peoples behavior.

AspieRouge that is pure bullshiterry coming from ya

Too bad we dont have an emoticon for a dope slap!

Earth to Shrox

Adam and Eve PREDATED Abraham!

A+E 's children went out and "founded many nations".

It wasnt until two thousand years after A+E that Abraham founded the Jewish lineage.

BTW, he also founded the Arab line as well. The Jews through his wife, and the Arabs through his slave mistress.