rainbow walking

Thanx Theli,
That entire issue of original sin/hopeless depravity has always irked me, even when I believed in the christian god. I found that to be among the most irrational aspect of the doctrine.

Aquila ka Hecate

RW:

I wish that I were anywhere near half as eloquent as you.

As it is, I share your passion and disgust with (especially mono-)theistic 'morals'.

Many of us are doomed to never look up from grubbing in the dirt,faces forced down by this assumption that our natures are evil.


When what is truly evil is the assumption.

Godless Blessings to you
Terri

David M. Payne

Then that will be your loss ACS.

Great piece of writing RW. Check your PM, I sent you a message.

David

rebelnerd

Awesome post rainbow! I think you cut it pretty much to the bone. When I was a kid they taught us in Catholic school that we were guilty of Original Sin and would spend the rest of our lives trying to make amends for it. I remember thinking that I didn't like the people who taught me that, why did they want to make me out to be a bad kid?

As an teenager and an adult I figured out the guilt racket they had going and rejected it. Your essay states elegantly the mentality behind the guilt/control racket of organized religion.

Filo

rainbow walking

Thank you Terri,
Methinks you have under-scored this rather lengthy expose most eloquently. And your handle, Aquila ka Hecate is very eloquent. What does it mean?

rainbow walking

Thanx Dave. Check your PM. I've responded to your message.

rainbow walking

Hi Filo,
I want to expand on your experiences by sharing some of my own and the conclusions I've drawn from them.

When I became a licensed minister my primary focus was evangelism. I believed there were scores of hurting people in the world needing Jesus. People who were depressed, confused, hopelessly convinced they were powerless to change their circumstances. Helping these people was my reason for ministry. I was convinced that their lives could be salvaged if I could persuade them to embrace christianity and funnel them into a local denomination. Of course, true to my mis-concieved beliefs, I felt that I had to convince them that their problems originated in their lack of a proper identity, hence christianity being identified by christ.

Un-fortunately, as I became successful in doing this, some of them became members of the church I attended. It took awhile for me to realize it but I began to notice that the solution to their problems were not being addressed by the church. Instead, the church only replaced their problems with its problems. That is to say, it surrepticiously substituted a focus upon their needs by re-focusing their attention onto the needs of the church. Thus the church became the center of their universe and they became its vassals.

It wasn't until much later that I began to connect this to the teaching of original sin.

Having convinced a person that they are hopelessly depraved from birth falsely explains the behavior that exacerbated their identity crisis to begin with, rather than identifying it and addressing the patterns leading to the choices that brought such pain into their lives.

They are provided an explanation that doesn't address the patterns but only excuses them as inevitable consequences of their nature. This excuse seems to work because it alleviates them from the responsibility of their decisions, (forgiveness) but it fails miserably in teaching them the proper reasons behind their choices. It's always pigeon-holed into "the devil made me do it" or hopeless depravity of man's nature. Neither of these are true explanations for the pain they are suffering as a result of the consequences of un-informed or ill-informed decisions that led them to make bad choices in the first place.

The major source of all shattered lives is "bad decisions". The one and only true method availble to rectify the consequences is accurate knowledge available to guide future choices. To teach a person that their "bad decisions" are the result of a depraved nature, rather than simply a result of ignorance, leaves the person helpless in securing the knowledge that would expand their field of future choices.

It is analogous to an insect whose wings are seared by the heat eminating from a light that the insect is overwhelmingly attracted to. The smart thing for the insect is to fly away from this light as fast as possible to preserve the integrity of the wing span it has left. But the light, which is the source of its fascination and the cause of its wing destruction, has such a magnetic attraction that the insect ultimately perishes. Such is the ultimate effect of the church and religion on the mind of man.

A unique aspect of our nature as a distinct species is our consciouse awareness, not only of our external environment, but also of our internal "selves". We constantly modify our circumstances based on this conscious awareness. We begin at a very early age to develop a unique and distinctive identity or personality. When our ability to develop is hampered and effected by external forces such as "peer pressure" or "dysfunctional family life" we struggle to develop identites consistent to our communities and begin to experience an internal conflict between who we think we are and what our community experience will tolerate. This dissonance creates an un-healthy mental picture of us that is reflected in our choices that re-inforce this mental dis-ease giving the erroneous impression that "who-we-are" is irreparably damaged beyond repair. Hence "hopeless depravity" permeates our self awareness long before anyone gives voice to it and declares us to be victims of original sin.

In reality we are only victims of our ignorance as to the operation of our human nature as its variously competitive forces create stresses in our intellectual capacity to quantify them. We are the only species with the capacity to over-ride our natural internal drives by relegating them into a proper order of necessity in consenance with our community and environment.

A good example of this competitiveness between our innate natural human motors is the teenage boy under the influence of and experiencing the effects of his hormones, on a date with a beautiful young girl. Having made sexual advances that she has frustrated, he is now experiencing the full force of this internal competition. He could, due to his physical stature, in comparison to hers, simply ignore her will and force himself on her to satisfy the raging drive to procreate. But more than likely he'll choose an alternative route and say something like, "why not?". From this point onward it becomes an intellectual competiton between his will and intellectual content and hers. She will likely expound a reason for her reluctance that may be based on moral strictures or the conflicting peer pressure of having a "reputation". Or she may simply appeal to the reason that she just doesn't like him that much. What prevented him from acting on his first impulse? The competition created by his innate drive for a place in a community that has established such behavior as repulsive.

Once we realize these natural motors are neither good nor evil, but are simply survival and replication mechanisms, we can begin to effect an intelligent systematic means of assigning them proper roles in our lives instead of being helpless pawns to their impact upon our wills. It can be shown how every choice made is a product of our rationalizations used to satisfy the demands of one motor force to the exclusion and frustration of another. How we deal with the satisfaction and or frustration of these forces will determine our choices, behavior and their consequences.

To declare these innate natural motors as "evil" strips us of our power to manipulate and control them and leaves us in a position to be manipulated and controlled by them. The reason this is so also traces back to our natural innate drive for survival. Anything adjudicated by us to be life threatening or harmful gets tagged as "evil" and our natural reaction is to avoid it at any cost. Primitive man had no way of knowing that his choices were being determined by internal natural drives that were instrumental in his uniqueness as a species. So everytime he lost a battle in the internal competition between these forces and did something that brought harmful, consequences to himself or his community, the religious assertion that this was evidence of man's evil nature seemed more plausible. But we must embrace our nature and study its effects on our minds and lives. If it is deemed evil and sinful we will not consider its role because we will close our eyes to it and hope it goes away.

Intelligent response to our experiences, both internal and external, is the only viable method of improving our lives and choices. Accepting those internal conflicts as the inevitable evidence that we are hopelessly depraved does not constitute intelligent response nor does it encourage it. Thus religion is anti-thetical to the advancment of the human species and must be identified and resisted. In addition religion has proven ineffective in affording man a means of assigning proper value to those innate drives it has written off as wholesale evil.

Religion served its purpose in helping primitive man establish the viability of community in the absence of the knowledge necessary to assist man in his struggle to assimilate and subjugate the internal pressures inconsistent to community. But it has outlived its usefulness and is threatening to become the albatross sure to usher in the next dark age as modern forces align to do major battle over intolerable religious differences.

God is a dinasuar whose bones are best left to the forces of nature.

If I were to judge the sin committed by Adam and Eve I would say their greatest sin was that they did not properly digest the fruit of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

If I were to judge the actions of the serpent I would say that it misrepresented the facts about their eyes being opened. Their eyes were already open, it was their minds that remained closed and have been welded shut by the religious edicts that followed.

If I were a prophet I would announce a decree that man must, if he is to survive, plant his own tree of the knowledge of good and evil from the seeds we've labored for centuries to identify and invite all communities to freely partake of its fruit because it is, and has always been, NATURE that produces such things. Human nature in response to its environment. If that first tree belonged to god, well, Adam and Eve were guilty of trespassing and theft. But if god truly gave man dominion over all that exists, then man has violated no covenant with this god but has actually lived in full compliance ever since.

I say again, we are not, nor have we ever been helplessly depraved.

Aquila ka Hecate

Hi there rw:

Just passing through between rides in my new car...got to have a little boast

My online handle is actually my wiccan name.

I'm a recovering high priestess.

It translates roughly (because it's composed of three languages) into 'Eagle spirit of Hecate (patron deity of witches)'.

I still celebrate the seasons in a pagan manner even though I'm no longer wiccan.

Got to dash...

Jobar

Rainbow Walking, such posts as yours, using the language and terminology of Christianity to expose the gaping holes in Christian belief, are IMO the most effective way to remove the blinders from those who cling to 'faith' as an answer to all life's problems.

What we need is some sort of 'Christians Anonymous' with a multi-step program to help people escape from this dreadful addiction! And the first step, in contrast to the mind-numbing strictures of AA, would be, "I CAN!"

Do you, rw, or any of the others here, care to develop this (in another thread)?

[ June 29, 2002: Message edited by: Jobar ]</p>

rainbow walking

hmmm...that's an interesting thought Jobar. Let me give it some consideration and get back with you.