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Doctrinal Damage of the Collateral Sort (Part 1)
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I ended my last entry by stating that whether you’re religious, atheist, or couldn’t care less, if you think the ancient story-fable of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit isn’t part of your story, you’re not paying attention. Then again, how easy is it to discern something that has become so much a part of the environment that it has become invisible? Think of it as part of the white noise, the background music you don’t really hear, its lyrics repeating and repeating and repeating how we humans are “Fallen”—that is, “bad to the bone.” Yes you, too, and me, newborn babies. (Why do you think we rush to baptize them, wash away their sins?) It took about a thousand years for religious thinkers to work all this out, but I’ll spare you the details and just say that some of the postexilic interpreters (see 02 April, 2010 entry) decided that the incident with the forbidden fruit was the reason for the Fall, that Adam’s and Eve’s punishment was mortality and that, since all humans are mortal, it must be true that we all share in Adam’s and Eve’s sinful nature. St. Paul carried this idea over into Christianity, where it lay dormant until the early church, defending orthodoxy from the so-called “heresies,” used it to formulate the doctrine of Original Sin, that moronic view of human nature that survived to shape the nature of Christianity, fuel its darkness (the Inquisition, etc.), and color Western civilization’s idea of itself and the world for about 1,500 years—so far. Among the ironies is that the words “Original Sin” are nowhere in the Bible. The doctrine emerges from an interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, one that blames them both for the Fall, but blames her a bit more, setting up a an imbalance that religion’s darker side has done its best to maintain despite the ongoing collateral damage. My grandmother’s life, for instance. Her story tomorrow. |
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By: John R. Coats
On Saturday, 24 April 2010
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A Few Notes About My Blog
This is not a religious blog, because Genesis is not religious, not in the way we tend to think about religion—that is, belief in a formal or informal set of beliefs about a Supreme Being.
What you will not find in a reading of Genesis:
- Anyone trying to convert anyone else;
- People praying together. Yes, Jacob did pray. Twice. The first time was the morning after the dream about the ladder, the second, twenty years later, on hearing the scouting report that Esau was bringing 400 armed men to their reunion. This, the brother he’d cheated, who, last he’d heard, was "consoling himself by planning to kill you";
- Anyone whose personal presentation—i.e., manner of speaking, vocabulary, the sort of real and false piety now ubiquitous in the media—signifies him or her as a "religious" person.
What you will find in a reading of Genesis:
- Characters who occupy a deeply ironic, unique place in the human imagination. On the one hand, their moral/spiritual DNA is embedded in the foundations of Western civilization. On the other, but for biblical stories and commentaries, no proof of their existence is to be found in the vast archeological record. They are probably fictional creations, yet they have and continue to shape us as a society and as individuals, those of us who are religious and those of us who are not;
- Three thousand year old stories achingly human in their narratives of stupidity, greed, bravery, cunning, courage and the rest. In other words, stories and characters that are universal, that, if the reader wants, can be a conduit into the self, and into the deeper matters of being human. In fact, I would say that anyone who does a close reading of Genesis, who looks deeply into the characters, will find reflections of his/her own best and worst selves.
One last thing: Because these stories and characters have shaped us all, they belong to us all, the unreligious as well as the religious. Think of them as property held in common.
