Stuck between apes and angels
Play
Re: "Bad to the bone", Fresh Ink, Sunday Nation, May 24.
The book review of James Boyce’s “Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World” has one glaring omission: It doesn’t tell us who invented the doctrine of original sin. The blame for that falls on Paul of Tarsus, aka St Paul, who, if he didn’t invent the doctrine, was at least its chief advocate in the first century CE. Paul wrote his letters before the gospels were composed, thus injecting the virus of original sin into the vulnerable body of infant Christianity before it was even able to toddle. Because of his influence, Christianity as we have received it might more properly be called Paulianity.
The evil effects of the sick doctrine of original sin were brought home to me many years ago when the eight-year-old daughter of a friend came running home from Sunday School in tears, crying, “Daddy, am I a sinner?” Any religion that tells eight-year-old children they are sinners ought to be consigned to the graveyard of failed religions.
That humankind is a flawed commodity ought to be obvious to even the most casual observer. But that we’re born sinners overstates the case. We seem to be stuck in an evolutionary rut somewhere on the continuum between ape and angel. Right now it looks as if the ape is winning. But it ain’t over till it’s over, as Yogi Berra wisely reminds us. And Michael Douglas might have stated the true situation most aptly in the movie “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps”, when, as Gordon Gekko, he tells his daughter and her boyfriend, “We’re all mixed bags.”
William Page
