Jan. ‘10 3316
3379 words
Sin
1. Introduction
The older I get the more driven I feel to take literally what I read or hear and when someone says, “Oh, you know what I mean,” I say tell me and then I take that literally. I find that doing this helps cleanse thought of nonsense. Sometimes while driving I listen to an Evangelical Christian radio station and I am struck by how centered on sin these electronically resonated preachers are. They talk as though we are all as deserving of punishment as are mass murderers. Not all conceptions of sin will be discussed, just the more draconian which link sin with hell and were dominant among early and medieval Christian writers, early Protestant writers and evangelical Protestants today.
Sin is not puzzling when it just means immoral behavior condemned by God, but its relations to original sin, divine forgiveness of sin, divine punishment and hell are puzzling indeed. My primary thesis is that the idea of divine punishment in hell is either incoherent or immoral for the following reasons.
(1) It is double jeopardy for those already punished by prison or disgrace (triple jeopardy if we count punishment for earned sin and original sin separately).
(2) Punishment in hell is grotesquely disproportionate to the wrongs we have done, if only because it lasts forever.
(3) Original sin implies we deserve punishment even if we did nothing sinful; it is said to be inherited from Adam and Eve, but I don’t see how I can inherit sin anymore than I can inherit my grandfather’s knowledge of Swedish.
(4) Early Christian theologians’ threats of hell for everyone who is not forgiven by Christ and does not become a Christian seem more clearly political than moral.
It appears we must be forgiven two kinds of sin. We commit sin when, for example, we rob or kill, for which we may go to prison and, after we die, to hell. I’m calling this earned sin; but even if we do not earn any sin we still go to hell unless forgiven by Christ because our sinful nature manifests a second kin of sin, original sin (as though one were not enough). Claims by Christian Churches that our very nature is sinful has, over the centuries, caused countless millions of people to despise themselves as unworthy of love or happiness.
When people do bad things they may deserve reprimands by their spouses, friends or employers, they might deserve to lose their jobs or even go to prison. I’m glad to be forgiven by my wife or my friends for some thoughtless act. But why need God get involved in this, why isn’t my wife’s or friend’s forgiveness enough? What reason is there to believe we are so evil we deserve eternity in hell, avoidable only through repentance and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross? Since no greater punishment than hell can be conceived, it is preposterous (and, I shall argue, manipulative and morally wrong) to suggest that anyone deserves hell.
2. Whence Morality?
Would humans have no morality without the idea of God? Could God’s conception of what is moral have been different than ours? Neither is possible because every moral commandment or rule we attribute to God originates with ourselves, which is why we are sure God’s commandments are moral; no rule said to be from God would be believed to be so unless it satisfied our own standards of right and wrong. If Moses had come down from the mountain with a commandment to do whatever you think is pleasant including seducing your neighbor’s spouse and killing your neighbor for money, the Hebrews of the time would have tossed out the tablets and we would never have heard of Moses. His contemporaries would have told him God doesn’t believe immoral things like that and if some supernatural being does believe it, that being is not God. A necessary condition for believing that a moral judgment comes from God is antecedently believing it is a correct moral judgment.
Some kind of proto-morality was a requirement of innate human sociality which began biologically evolving perhaps 150,000 years ago and before the evolution of language; we had to have been social animals for tens of thousands of years for the physiological organs of speech to evolve, not to mention the need for other people with whom to speak. There are clear reasons why human sociality requires morality and, long ago, precursors of morality. A clan that reinforced developing group loyalty, a growing sense of societal identity and the feelings of mutual obligation this engendered, would do better at motivating clan defense, would have fewer members abandon it and would make it easier for clan members to develop a sense that they should keep unwanted hands off other members’ bodies and property.
Social morality developed incrementally along with evolving sociality, long before monotheism and when actions by propitiateable rain or volcano spirits were the only explanations of the natural world they knew. There was no “How did it happen?” because there was no science; their question could only be “Who did it?” because their only paradigms of explanation were human and animal agency. What is biological and what is cultural about the evolution of sociality and morals is a long story that concerns societal needs and stability; but the origin and development of morality has nothing to do with God or gods. Religion itself developed incrementally with animistic and then polytheistic explanations of natural phenomena, followed by pleas for help and intervention, many thousands of years before people began attributing moral edicts to gods because the purpose of animism and early polytheism was explanation and intervention, not morals.
Nearly everyone believes some bad acts are worse than others and hence that some punishments, if one believes in punishment at all, should be more severe than others. Just as we would not accept a putative divine commandment unless it were consistent with preexisting human morality, we should not believe and accept biblical and theologians’ threats of divine punishment which are out of all proportion to human punishments we already accept. We should not accept them as reasonable–as “fitting the crime”–and hence we ought not believe they really come from God. What then are we to make of the idea that we all deserve eternal torment in hell? This is the main puzzle that concerns me. I aim to show that the claim that all humans are so sinful they deserve eternal damnation unless forgiven by Christ is incorrect. There are four parts to my argument.
1. All of our moral rules and beliefs originate with us.
2. Degrees of guilt and accountability for violating moral rules originate with us.
3. Degrees of appropriate punishment must match degrees of guilt and accountability and therefore cannot be the same for everyone.
4. It is incoherent to believe in punishments for immorality which are inconsistent with human views of what immorality deserves.
Believing on faith that Christ died and then miraculously rose from the dead, although inconsistent with experience and science which tell us that when people die they stay dead, is not necessarily incoherent. We understand what is claimed whether or not we believe it: Someone who was dead gets up and talks with people. But the wickedness of people is not part of the realm of science and causation into which God might intervene, such as His miraculous parting of the red Sea or Jesus turning water into wine. If you believe rape is morally worse then car theft and therefore deserves greater punishment, does it make sense to believe that God, by a miracle, could change the moral order and make it the case that stealing a car deserves greater punishment than rape? The reason we cannot imagine God miraculously making car theft worse than rape is because it would imply that we antecedently thought car theft worse than rape and no miracle is needed. You can also think of as like Moses presenting tablets telling us we may rape our neighbor’s spouse. There is no physical fact to alter like turning water into wine.
“But if God says we deserve eternal damnation for car theft, we do.” Certainly, that is easy to believe if we think we all deserve eternal damnation whatever we do, which raises a question I cannot go into here as to whether God can think any bad actions are worse than others. But it is incoherent to think God might surprise us by announcing that car thieves deserve greater punishment than rapists unless we first think so ourselves; there is no natural process for God to suspend in order to do this. Since what we believe God says is right and wrong is what we attribute to Him, it follows that the actions God considers morally worse than others also mirror our own views. So too, punishments we attribute to God should be what we find in the Bible and the writings of early and medieval theologians.
But this is not what we find. We are either saved by Christ and promised eternal bliss or condemned to eternal punishment in hell. There are no degrees of punishment (although some medieval clerics talk about purgatory). Since we believe an eternity of suffering is much worse than car thieves deserve–because we don’t sentence them to prison forever-- we have no recourse but to conclude that the idea of hell for everyone who is not saved by Christ is incoherent and the motive for claiming this is puzzling.
3. Lust and Original Sin
Sins are commonly thought of simply as immoral behavior. But the traditional Christian idea of original sin is that we are all depraved and corrupt in our very natures. The very name “original sin” tells us it is not a product of moral offenses; it appears not to concern morality at all. So what is it? According to many theologians it is the literal inheritance of a corrupted human nature from Adam and Eve, who disobeyed their maker by accepting a forbidden fruit offered Eve by a talking snake.
Many early and medieval Christians loathed themselves for having “carnal thoughts and desires.” There is Saint Augustine of Hippo’s (354-430) fear and loathing of lust and carnal love and therefore his loathing of himself and everyone. Sexual love comes from your corporeal rather than your spiritual nature and Augustine said that if you could not remain chaste for life, you should admit you are a failure and marry. He said that humanity is a “massa damnata,” that concupiscence destroys will and makes us “moral maggots” (Augustine’s metaphor). 1100 years later, Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564) declared concupiscence the primary manifestation of our sinful nature. When early and medieval Christian thinkers sought an empirical instantiation of the original sin that infects everyone, there was only one thing it could be: lust, sexual desire. It is universal, it made Adam and Eve launch humanity and it is a corporeal rather than spiritual source of pleasure and happiness. So, is original sin a depraved nature we inherit from Adam and Eve, or simply the lust which pulls us away from the spiritual? Or is it something else?
I’ve long wondered why Christian theologians denounce sex so vehemently. It seemed unfair and cruel because sexual romantic love and a family constitute the only source of happiness as readily available to the poor as to the rich. I find it plausible that the abomination of sex by the Christian Church was more political than pathological, perhaps excepting St. Augustine. With sexual and familial love a family could, with a little luck, be happy and not see religion as their only escape from a world of misery. So the Church poisoned sexual love with sin in order to make people feel guilty about what was most likely to make them content with this world and therefore feel less need for Christianity. Carnal love was Christianity’s primary, universal competitor. Original sin was its counter weapon. The Russian communists confronted a somewhat similar problem. Before the revolution many communists believed in free love, but after they took power in 1917 they became relatively puritanical. Sex became a competitor which could dilute the people’s enthusiasm for the revolution and the Soviet Communist Party.
The threat of hell is best viewed as a doctrine attributed to God by early Christian churchmen, largely as a recruitment tool. We can imagine something analogous in ancient clans: The witch doctor says, “If you disregard my taboos, after you die the worm and spider spirits will have you.” However, whether threats of hell should be believed is more important than what we suppose are the motives for making them and it won’t do just to say that this is a matter of faith. What we are asked to believe on faith must be coherent, it must make sense, and, as I have argued, the threat of hell is not coherent. Why, exactly, are we such sinners? I have not done anything which deserves thirty days in jail; how then can I deserve hell? This is not arrogance on my part. I have done things I regret and I have offended people; where possible I have tried to make things right. It is said that Christ died for my sins but my wrong thoughts and wrong actions are not so terrible that anyone, Christ or me, should die for them. Moreover, if God wanted to forgive our sins why didn’t he just do it instead of sending Christ to engage in a proxy expiation? Are anyone’s sins are so terrible that the Christian extravaganza of threatened hell, limitless guilt, confession, the crucifixion and divine forgiveness seems necessary. Original sin’s function, I suggest, is to remedy the absence of actual immorality–earned sin–of a severity warranting hell and requiring divine salvation, in this way ensuring that no one escaped the need to ask Christ’s forgiveness and thereby become a Christian. If we are not forgiven by God for having Adam and Eve as ancestors, we suffer eternal damnation. Such an idea is simply crazy because our own judgment, the same judgment that says no one deserves execution for jaywalking, tells us no one deserves endless punishment. Hence we must continue trying to explain the dissonance between what people think is morally appropriate in this world and the doctrine of endless divine punishment.
4. Hell
The need to be forgiven one’s sins by Christ to avoid hell and enter heaven isn’t reconcilable with humans being the original source of what is right and wrong. Many New Testament moral pronouncements mirror extant human morality regarding what we should and should not do; but not so regarding punishment. Here, God is made to say that how sinful your behavior seems to you and to the rest of humanity is irrelevant to whether you deserve heaven or hell. Different degrees of punishment for different degrees of immorality are a human invention and ought to be concordant with the punishments attributed to God; since they are not and God by definition is moral, we must conclude that these dreadful punishments are not God’s but are the inventions of theologians. Morality was and is essential to society’s survival, but original sin, hell and the absence of degrees of postmortem punishment have no connection of any kind with the morality necessary for the development and preservation of human society; they are not essential to anything but are theological suppositions with no roots in societal needs.
Why is the one postmortem punishment with which we are threatened–eternity in hell–the very worst when some unsaved sinners are not as bad as others? The simplification that attempts to make sense of this on the pre-mortem side is original sin which, being equal for everyone, fits a postmortem punishment equal for everyone, and neither has anything to do with morality. This is why it is it so horrible, without any correlation with what anyone deserves, and why you are threatened with the same postmortem punishment as is a mass murderer. There were both psychological and political reasons for inventing original sin. What I find plausible is that it is a diabolical invention of early Christian writers: Become a Christian or burn forever in hell. Hell is not punishment for our sins, it is punishment or not becoming a Christian; but no one in his right mind can think eternal damnation fits that crime. There is a moral difference between a jaywalker and the person who ran a Nazi death camp; yet, if the jaywalker and the Nazi contritely ask forgiveness of Christ, both go to heaven and I don’t get to argue with the Nazi in hell. Divine “reward” and “punishment” have nothing to do with earned rewards or punishments, they are about the demand to accept Christianity, or else.
5. Conclusion
Now one might question the point of these criticisms since people believe on faith what I criticize and therefore rational support for their beliefs isn’t of the essence; perhaps faith may take over when reason falls silent. But reason hasn’t fallen silent. Those who view faith and science as two ways of knowing probably are not prepared for how their view fares in the light of morality and common sense because moral beliefs are much less obviously proper objects of faith than are factual claims. One can comprehend faith in what science cannot prove or disprove, such as that God created the universe, but we are talking about morals, not science: If you shot someone by accident it makes no sense to say both that you deserve a month in jail plus a fine and that God thinks you deserve eternity in hell. Which is it? It doesn’t help to suppose that God can see moral faults we do not see or don’t see to be so evil, for we can hypothesize what one’s motives are and thoughts are. It isn’t like not knowing the gun was loaded, it is like not knowing it doesn’t matter whether or not the gun was loaded.
People make judgments all the time about whether certain moral claims come from God but they don’t like to think about it. For example, the Old Testament book of Leviticus, Chapter 20, tells us to kill at least a dozen different kinds of people–idolaters, homosexuals, blasphemers, adulterers, etc. Most people today do not attribute this to God but to the fanaticism and prejudices of certain ancient Hebrews, but they don’t talk about it because the entire Bible is supposed to be the infallible word of God. It is no more obvious, morally, that you deserve eternity in hell unless saved by Christ than that you should go out and start killing homosexuals and blasphemers.
I have tried to show that thinking one believes something by faith is not always coherent. One might believe on faith what cannot be proven or is otherwise doubtful, but believing nonsense on faith is, well, nonsense. The third-century theologian Turtullian (160-220) is famous for saying, “Credo quia absurdum” which, he would be happy to hear, is nonsense. Ought not contemporary Christians feel obliged to understand why and how sin can make us deserve eternal punishment, that is, how it makes sense apart from whether or not it is plausible? And if we cannot understand it, if it makes no sense, ought we not delete it from the list of things we are invited to believe on faith?
Four summary points: First, sin and fear of hell have been exploited to recruit converts to Christianity. Second, original sin was invented so that no one would feel substantially virtuous and therefore not worry about hell. Third, sex and sexual love were condemned as sinful and depraved because they could make people happy in this world and hence feel less need for religion. Sexual desire being universal and strong, it was opportune and clever to identify it with original sin.
Finally, claiming that universal sin implies eternal damnation unless one chooses to be forgiven and saved by Christ, is immoral. No one deserves that kind of punishment and ordinary people ought not be terrified by threats of hell and told their reasonably decent lives are worth nothing.
