[quote author=“child”]
Going way off topic now, but an obvious corollary, nonetheless, the warrant for the Christian defense of evil rests on the cloudy Christian concoction that suffering and sin are a product of the Fall, thus leading to the necessity of special revelation and intervention of the Holy Spirit.
The Fall or Original Sin
The religions of Judaism, Christianity and Moslem faiths were all born from the same seed, Judaism.
The basic premise that all men are born into sin is a relatively new concept. In this age of humanity we have allowed ourselves to be duped into believing in a concept that has no basis in physical reality.
Early thinkers could imagine a better world but such a world seemed impossible for them to create and it was, given the state of their stone age agricultural technology. Their vision of a better world became to them the Garden of Eden. They lived in a desert.
Although they could ‘see’ the Garden in their ‘vision’ (imagination) they were ultimately frustrated by the fact that their vision (imagination) was not one belonging to the real physical world.
Through their vision the Garden became a place that was real in their minds eye but it was separate from physical reality. Over time the idea of the Garden, in which man was free from want, became real in their minds eye and logically they had to come up with a reason that man was separated from the Garden.
Their emotions, the emotions all men feel come from the natural order of things.
For example, when a man was hunting and/or gathering fear was a very helpful and life saving emotion. A man that holds fear, is careful in his pursuit of game. A man careful to be aware of his surroundings when gathering fruit has a much better chance of surviving than the man that does not pay attention to the fact that on the rock ledge above his head a lion is crouching.
Rational men have felt guilt ever since the first moment that they realized that the life they were ending, to survive, was the same life that they held within themselves. These life saving emotions work against the individual in a organized or civilized society.
Men begin to distrust their emotions because as time had passed they had changed from being nomads, hunters and gathers to herders and farmers, Cain and Able, with a set of emotions more befitting wild animals.
Although their social status had changed from hunters and gathers to herders and farmers their emotional state had not had a chance to settle down. In other words although they were gaining knowledge of the real physical world their emotions were not in sync with their new found mode of living as farmers and herders.
The only logical and reasonable explanation to them, of their animalistic emotions and for their inability to attain the vision in their mind’s eye, was that they were corrupt. They began to imagine not letting their emotions drive their decisions. Reason was dawning upon them.
This same scenario took place across the face of the Earth within each culture and social group.
The Hebrews lived in the desert. To survive in the desert the social group must act together to survive. Hebrews religious leaders had gained a profound incite into the nature of man in a social group by persevering in the desert for so many years.
Guilt, an emotion only humans are known to experience, worked wonders as a social control mechanism. Hebrews religious leaders solution to the fact that not all their subjects felt guilt was to bestow upon them Original Sin.
The Hebrews religious teachers educated the members of their tribe that men had been ejected from the vision of freedom from want, ejected from Gods presence and that corruption was universal. Hebrew religious educators corrupted natural emotions.
God, a single entity responsible for the creation of all things, was all powerful and all knowing. Things had not been going well for the Hebrews at this time but God would redeem them. The Hebrews would be given a life free from want in the Garden. Fresh fruit, grain and vegetables were good.
Maybe it would be better to conquer a neighboring tribe, Caanan, than to trade sheep for fruit and grain.
The Caannites worshiped a different god. Caananites understood themselves to be children of Mother Earth. The Hebrews conquered Caanan and forced the surviving women and children to worship the Hebrew God.
Hebrews religious teachers were the dispenser’s of natural, religious and social laws in a way which was paralleled later in history during the reign of the Pope’s Roman Catholic church before the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther.
The earliest cities of Mesopotamia and the Levant were directed by priests who established coherent rules for the society. The temple was erected at the center of the town and was the most awe inspiring building.
This pattern of a society with a centralized place of worship can be seen in the all the ancient cities of the Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
Historically the role of religion in every civilization was religion’s ability to establish a common moral order. Priests, or kings derived their authority from the gods and they were the ones who devised the moral and social codes that kept increasingly complex societies operating in a civilized manner.
Babylon derived its name from Ba- bi-ilani, or “the gate of the gods,” the place were the gods descended to Earth.
Inca urban society rested on the belief that their rulers were gods, their word law.
Greek and Roman communities shared a powerful sense of “sacred space” in their central core and each devised elaborate codes of social and moral law.
Islam fostered the creation of a coherent civilization by imposing a rule of law that applied to personal and commercial transactions.
After the fall of Rome, the Catholic Church preserved the last vestiges of civilization in Europe by providing the legal system under which European civilization could function.
For the average fundamentalist Christian, Jew or Moslem believer today the only way to believe in the God of the Hebrews is to make a leap of faith, to abandon logic, to abandon reason, and accept what the Hebrew religious teachers had ordained about man kinds removal from the presence of God.
Lawrence Turner
