FuManchu

I've been meaning to ask someone this for some time, and this seems a sensible place to do so.

Consider the following:

1. It is generally claimed that sin came into the world when Adam and Eve ate from the tree in the Garden of Eden.
2. Sin is characterised as disobedience to God.
3. It is possible to sin by thought, regardless of whether you act upon it. (A good example would be Jesus' famous statement that to look at a women with lust is to commit adultery.)

All right, here's the next bit:

4. When you do something, thought comes before action. You decide to do something, then you do it.
5. Therefore, Adam and Eve must have decided to eat the forbidden fruit before actually eating it.

With me so far? Here's the final part:

6. God had told them not to eat the fruit.
7. Therefore, they decided to do something in disobedience to God.
8. Which is, itself, a sin.
9. But a sin that took place before they had eaten the fruit.
10. At which point sin wasn't supposed to exist.

So doesn't that make the whole thing a bit meaningless? The only way out I can see is if you characterise the fruit itself as purely symbolic and meaningless, and say that the decision was in fact the Original Sin and the fruit itself didn't impart any particular sinning properties. Or the story could be a badly-thought-out myth, of course, but I thought I'd treat it seriously for the sake of argument. Any thoughts?

Wedge

I doubt this is helpful, but IMO the whole story is so silly that you might as well argue about why the vampires were too stupid to hire a sniper to shoot Buffy from a rooftop.

Christians, using the generalization for convenience here, take the idea that Jesus condemned feeling anger and lust as equivalent to murder and adultery seriously. So it isn't even the decision that was a sin - it was being tempted in the first place! But since Adam and Eve were created as good, they shouldn't have been tempted...

The mind boggles. Then it runs off to play in Sunnydale, which is more entertaining.

Roger Pearse

The point about original sin is that *no-one* needs help with it.

Amaleq13

I think your error is attempting to apply logic to an ultimately incoherent religious doctrine.

Christianity has fabricated a "disease" everyone carries so that it can claim itself the only source for the "cure".

An excellent basis for a con job, actually.

Wedge

But it's much more fun with two.:devil1:

FuManchu

Indeed. I suppose I should have clarified; I'm about to deploy this argument on a creationist website, and I I'm looking for ways they might try to find around it. Working under the assumption that they don't just say "Damn it, the game's up, you've exposed our ultimately incoherent religious doctrine", of course. I haven't seen them do that yet, but there's a first time for everything.

Timetospend

I think that the primary argument would be somethig along the lines that the act itself was the completion of the thought. Therefore, the thought is an embedded aspect of the actual act such that reference to the act includes reference to the thought.

Cege

Just so I understand, are you saying that the fabrication of "sin disease" is the fault of Christianity? or was it inherited by Christianity from Judaism?

Cege

I've never given this any thought before, but it occurs to me now that if the serpent was Satan-in-disguise, and Satan had fallen to earth from heaven because of disobedience to God, then it follows that sin came into/onto the earth by way of Satan's fall.

By that way of thinking, Adam and Eve eating the fruit just spread sin to humans. Their disobedience didn't introduce sin to earth after all.

mung bean

My problem with original sin is slightly different. If the fruit was from the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" then before they ate Adam and Eve would have no way of telling right from wrong. How, then, can they be justly punished?