Sep 12th, 2004, 06:31 AM
Original Sin
I've always been dissatisfied with conventional theology's stance on original sin. So, I made one for Coeternalism! It needs input, of course.
To believe in Coeternalism is to recognize certain patterns of aesthetic beauty in the workings of the universe. Where the human spirit is involved, such beauty abounds most significantly in the perseverance of good over evil. Evaluation of such beauty, however, must be done carefully in the framework of Coeternalism, as the methods of psychological and sociological reductionism espoused by this way of thinking often run close to blurring or eradicating a cogent understanding of good and evil. For such reasons, an integral foundation based upon the nature of sin and benevolence is required to sufficiently rationalize theological constructs in Coeternalism. At the core of such an explanation lies the concept of Original Sin, which in its renovation retains a great many of its orthodox tenants.
One of the most belabored points of contention in the history of religious thought has been the question Why does evil exist in a world created by an all-loving God? The most comprehensive and typical explanation offered by orthodoxy is that a gift reflective of God’s love was bestowed on man, that being man’s personal agency in spelling out his own destiny. By his imperfection, man corrupted the world and all of history by choosing of his own volition a path that directly contradicted the will of God. Ever since this Original Sin, however it was historically undertaken, all of mankind has been marked by the inevitable lapse into sin, imperfection, and ultimately death.
Projection of this image ultimately leads toward a contradiction that has never been adequately resolved. If God is all-powerful and all-loving, and has prescience of all of history, he could not have created mankind without realizing its imperfection and its bearing on a path to failure. Introducing the notion of an afterlife, elementary logic demonstrates that God created human beings fully intent on sending many of them to hell. To posit such a deed to the God portrayed scripturally innumerable times as having the greatest possible love for His creations is asinine.
The foremost root of error in this way of thinking lies in the fact that eternal life is assumed to occur after mortality, begetting the assumption that the ethereal element of human existence proceeds from the corporeal. That is, whatever happens in life does by choice, and what happens in the afterlife is a logical progression thereof. Coeternalism, however, maintains that human history is subservient to the nature of humanity’s eternal destiny. Whereas orthodoxy holds that human history just happens, Coeternalism asserts that it is a process that fulfills a certain purpose for the ethereal collective. Within Coeternalism, mortal life serves to reflect the virtue and beauty of the soul. Unlike the orthodox view, Coeternalism holds that good and evil are not products of free will; conscious will is merely an illusory experience to provide for a coherent passage from one moment of awareness to the next. The virtue one commits in life is then an impression of the good nature of her soul. One point from Genesis that must be considered is the message that were there no sin in the world, there would be no death. What should be discerned from this is that a world devoid of evil would be in perpetual stasis, wherein “good” would be a redundancy. Human virtue, then, would lack meaning without an antithesis. For souls to demonstrate the quality of goodness, they must be defined against an abounding notion and experience of evil.
The outstanding difficulty in comprehending this pronouncement is appropriately realizing the interplay of ethereal will and human action. Human existence is marred and transitory, despite being the impression of eternal and flawless souls. The soul cannot then choose to do evil, it merely defines the essential character by which its life experiences and reacts to the occasion of sin. In His perfection, God created perfect souls which convey their beauty by the virtue expressed in their invariably imperfect lives. To understand this, think of shadow puppets cast onto a screen. The soul is the light source, and the produced image is corporeal life. The darkness within the produced shape is (appropriately) evil, which is not intrinsically related to the light source but nevertheless defines how we experience it.
The next stage in understanding the origins of sin comes by grounding such metaphysical notions into the rigidity of history. In accordance with the will of the ethereal collective, individual souls were manifested into their respective human lives. This predicated billions of years of cosmological evolution and biological speciation, culminating in the creation of Homo sapiens. It is not, as many would assume, a priori that the final stages of human evolution marked with their passing the implantation of the soul. That anthropology indicates that scores of millennia transpired from the passing of the first modern man as a species to the first stages of advanced civilization seems to hint at the contrary. The patterns of evolution are of great importance, however. Natural selection in advanced species necessitates a driving impetus of self-preservation within the organism so that it can successfully produce viable offspring to carry forward its genes. As social networks evolve within a species, at an individual level there must develop an ulterior notion of preservation of the community in addition to defense of the self. Thus many advancements in evolution are driven by the dialectic within individual organisms of preservation of the self versus that of the species. This forms a spectrum, between the poles of which all organisms fall. To demonstrate each extreme, think of animals resorting to cannibalism being the ultimate example of self-preservation, the opposite extreme being such as when a bee dies by using its sting for the sake of the hive.
Naturally, the center of attention lies at the case of how this polarity manifests itself into human evolution and social development. For the first several tens of millennia of their existence, humans generally clung to one another within groups of extended families and in this demonstrated concern strictly for the continuity of their own progeny. Within the last roughly 40,000 years, however, social units gradually became larger for various reasons. This lead to the ability to develop and sustain technology, eventually giving rise to the division of labor. Combined with the birth of language, such advancements led to the ultimate evolution of tribes into cities. When this progress became internalized in human development, humans gradually shifted from an extreme position in the spectrum from self-preservation to preservation of the community beyond one’s own family. This was a necessary step for the birth of early governing systems. More pertinently, however, is the fact that this shift gave rise to enduring notions of good and evil. St. Augustine was one of the first theologians to recognize this spectrum, labeling the pole of self-preservation cupiditas (cupidity, or greed) and that of preservation of humanity caritas (charity, or neighborly love). The relevance of this spectrum survives unto modernity. Each of the Seven Sins has some root in cupidity, and the foundation of love is the ability to put another before the self. Thus the extremes in terms of modern human acts could be demonstrated as murder done out of avarice, the diametric opposite being voluntary martyrdom.
While biology may eventually tell us for certain when modern man first walked the Earth, but we must look elsewhere to discern when exactly God blew into him the breath of life. Our only source to resolve this issue turns out to be scripture. To employ Genesis in evaluation of human history, it is essential to dissect it into its component parts: the error-prone work of fable, and the infallible theological thesis. The vast majority of the creation narratives were simply compilations of folk tales amassed by various early cultures. However, the affirmation that came later of its canonicity tells us that there most likely is spiritual value to the creation fables. Of particular relevance is what’s known as the Decreation Story. The second chapter of Genesis tells us that in the Garden of Eden, God created the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, whose fruit was forbidden to be eaten by the first humans. It was the violation of this one command that spelled out the doom of humanity; from thenceforward, man would suffer through life and ultimately die.
What are we to make of this story? Eden most likely existed only in some metaphorical sense, and it’s unlikely that Adam and Eve really ever lived. The most important element of the story is the association of the abilities of reason and morality with mortal corruption. Prior to eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve could not sin because of their ignorance forbidding them from deliberately acting wrongly. Thus the orthodox position is that humanity’s awareness of sin—depicted as the fateful eating of the fruit—led to its mortality. Coeternalism, however, uses these axioms and affords us the converse view. Humans are mortal because such is how the ethereal collective is best reflected. The metaphysical consequence of this mortality is the inevitable tendency to sin.
To recapitulate, the explanation for sin offered by Coeternalism is actually fairly simple. Evil exists merely as a byproduct of the expression of virtue, and its presence is necessary for the coherent passage of human history. The implications of Original Sin are that souls have a more meaningful existence by incorporating some notion of evil into their being, so long as it does not define them. Souls will only good, but evil pervades as an inevitable consequence of human nature.
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