Original Sin – The Original Sin

The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, even noble.

Bertrand Russell’s words (Why I am not a Christian) are apt to describe the worst species of the idea of ‘Sin’. Its creation can be found in the ramblings of the once raucous party boy of theology – ‘St.’ Augustine. The story goes that he was sitting in a Milanese garden, whereupon he heard children chanting the phrase ‘tolle lege’ – ‘take it and read’. At this climacteric moment in his life, Augustine picked up the Epistles of Paul (Romans 13: 13-14) and read these words: ‘Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexually immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealously. Rather clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.’ Thus was born original sin.

Humanity, Augustine would have you believe, were blessed with a perfect uncorrupted world. Then came the Fall. A snake began talking and encouraging Eve to commit the worst crime possible – scrumping. And she did it of her own volition. But this contemptible fairy tale has led to inordinate damage. The kind of damage it would be facetious to trivialise. This sin, many believe, is inherited by each and every human being. It is passed down through sexual intercourse from generation to generation. Those born in destitution, rancid poverty and misery, those subjected to tortures from birth, disease, famine and war face deserve no sympathy for these injustices because they were, like the rest of us, born in sin.

Once more, Bertrand Russell put most eloquently and soberly the abhorrent nature of such a doctrine:

I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children’s ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy himself in all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

It would have been bad enough for Augustine to have left his appalling idea at this. Unfortunately, he had a scholarly spat which threw him even further into the abyss that was already staring back into him. The British monk Pelagius, as Diarmaid MacCulloch describes in his excellent work A History of Christianity, has often been viewed as offering a nicer alternative to the starkness of Augustinian theology. Not so. Pelagius’ ideal world was ‘one vast monastery’. In his view, God demands high moral standards that we must obey of our own freewill. Nonetheless, what repulsed Pelagius about Augustine’s view was that it provided ‘false excuse for Christians passively to avoid making any moral effort’.

In Augustine’s work City of God, there are tracts attacking Pelagius’ thought. Augustine responds by asserting that our utterly corrupt nature entails that God’s decisions about who to save and who to condemn to hellfire are entirely arbitrary. Since God’s decisions are transcendent of time, salvation is predestined. The Fall was such a serious crime that it can provide justification for to condemn all humankind to the will of a celestial dictator. The worth of humanity to Augustine, if not already apparent, becomes so when you discover the word he used to describe it: massa – ‘lump’. Like a cancerous tumour, humanity is an unwelcome stain on God’s otherwise perfect universe.

Christianity of this guise filters through into the modern day. Most of all, Christianity is a religion of guilt. One where you are created evil and commanded to do good. If atheists need feel anything to Christians of this temperament, it is pity. The invisible hand of Augustine permeates the Christian conscience to remind each believer that they are worthless every time they begin to feel the onset of the faintest joy or happiness. In any form, nihilism is not only false, but dangerous. This is the equivalent of theistic nihilism.