As Practical as Potatoes
Here is a quote I rather admire from our own Mr. Vic Q. Ruiz:
To me, the one indisputable truth taught by Christianity is that the human species is an imperfect one, always liable to error and corruption. Those who instead believe that mankind is perfectible inevitably create hells on earth.
Any society that assumes that leaders will be flawed, and builds in self-correcting mechanisms, is bound to be both more successful and more happy in the long run than is a system which only works if the leaders are particularly virtuous. In short, what is desirable is the rule of law, and the rights of Englishmen.
He goes on to describe himself as an ally of Christianity, albeit not Christian himself.
Allow me to quote a parallel passage from a man who was a very thoroughly converted Christian, Mr. G. K. Chesterton:
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes.
Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt.
Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.
The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
My comment: when I was an atheist, one of the most offensive doctrines to me was the doctrine of original sin, which I took to be the idea that it was just, in God’s eyes, to penalize the innocent baby for the crimes of the father, and moreover than the punishment would be eternal burning in the hellfire, with no possibility of parole.
Allow me to quote at length a passionate denunciation of the idea of original sin, from the flaming pen of Ayn Rand, speaking through her allegorical prelapsarian man, John Galt.
John Galt is, by his own admission and self-anointing, as immaculate as Mary, for he is born without without original sin. That he is also crucified on an electrical torture apparatus, seems to die, and rises again from the dead to usher in the millennium is a symbolic parallel to heavy-handed to be overlooked. Galt literally raises his hand in the final paragraph of the book to bless the earth, but not with the Labarum, but with the Dollar Sign.
I am considerably less impressed with the rhetorical flourishes now than when I was an atheist, and am all too acutely aware of the intemperate straw man approach she adopts here.
Nonetheless, I give her full credit for at least attempting to base a worldview on the foundations of dispassionate reason.
She was quite passionate about dispassionate reason.
“Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible 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 incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting 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 unintelligible 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 be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin 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 guilty in a matter where no innocence 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.
…
“What is the nature of the guilt that 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 being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being. 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 cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, 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 standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.”
My comment: The degree of foolishness necessary to support this degree of misreading of the Genesis account of the Fall of Man passes beyond negligence, and becomes malicious.
Genesis has man as a rational creature before the Fall, for Adam speaks and names animals; he is a moral being, because he was given a commandment to follow, not an instinct, and was held to a standard of punishment for it; he labored to tend the garden, it is merely that the earth did not erect thorns and briars to hinder him, so the labor was joy rather than toil; he and wife are obviously sexual beings, for they are man and wife. Not only is there no evidence in any Biblical account for Adam and Eve living in abstinence, the first commandment of God to them is to be fruitful and multiply.
It is sad that Ayn Rand was an adulteress, since that rather undermines any alleged moral authority she pretends to have from whose lofty heights she seeks to dismiss Christian notions of monogamy and fidelity as immoral and corrupt.
She dismisses the notion of Original Sin by the same means, that is, merely misstating what the doctrine says. The sin was not rationality, morality, productivity, or sex. It was disobedience.
The “knowledge of good and evil” does not refer to philosophical awareness of the nature of good and evil, as if Adam and Eve somehow did not know it was wrong to disobey God or somehow had not been warned of the mortal consequences of disobedience.
The phrase is used throughout the Bible as a euphemism for the loss of innocence as when a child becomes an adult.
Even so, it is a metaphor prone to be read wrongly, for Adam and Eve, while adult, had no more practice of committing crime or vice as a newborn babies. We humans, whose sole experience of such innocence is only seen in babies, assume innocence means ignorance or naivety. It does not. Innocent means “not guilty.”
Adam and Eve were innocent of sin, but nothing in Genesis, or any Church teaching, says they were unaware of what sin was or what it meant. They knew full well what moral choice meant, as can be seen in the dialog between Eve and the Devil. Eve chose to heed the crooked serpent and disobey God, and Adam chose to heed his wife and disobey God.
God is reality. To flee depart from reality is to enter a world of falsehoods, false despair and false hopes. God is light. To depart from light is to enter darkness. God is logos, which is reason and order and the Word of God. To depart from them is to enter the realm of folly and chaos and spiritual anarchy. God is life. To depart life is to embrace death. God is love. To depart love is to enthrone pride and idolize it, and all the pantheon of deadly sins of which pride is queen and mother, and bow, and serve, and be enslaved.
If the punishment visited on man and all his sons seems harsh, it is because we underestimate the magnitude and severity of the offense.
We are not discussing robots or children. If anything, unhindered by a sinful upbringing, and newly made from the hand of the Creator in an unstained world, the mental clarity and genius of Adam may well have been greater than all his sons.
Even those unfamiliar with the doctrinal statement of Original Sin must notice that parents must teach children how to tell the truth or how to share, but a child will always discover for himself how to lie and steal, without any tutor. It comes naturally to man.
He is clear statement of what the doctrine actually entails, taken from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (italics in the original):
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397 Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of. All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness.
398 In that sin man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Constituted in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully “divinized” by God in glory. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to “be like God”, but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God”.
399 Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of this first disobedience. Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness. They become afraid of the God of whom they have conceived a distorted image – that of a God jealous of his prerogatives.
400 The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay”. Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground”, for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
