John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
I can appreciate your feeling the idea is bizarre. But the context for that idea, so far as this thread is concerned, relates to the discussion concerning the difference between the natural brain functions (to include, as you note, the entire biology of the body, since the brain is merely a profound part of that whole), versus some immaterial soul, you, we, or I, such as the entity both Richard Dawkins, and Theodore Schwartz, can't help but referencing, since without it their metaphysical materialism is absurd.
One simply can't say the brain is trying to trick us into thinking we're real, that we have freewill, when if that were true, our saying it would be no more real than the free-willed soul the statement is designed to deny.
Where the idea of original sin, i.e., that we're born sinners, comes into the picture, is the idea that only someone created as a whole, righteous, soul, would be likely to notice a distinction between right, versus the way the world actually is, broken.
The agnostic materialist become a quasi-idealist, Karl Popper, to his great credit came to realize just this truism such that he said the modern scientific-method, far from arising from natural, normal, observations and questions about the world, in fact came about only when certain kinds of persons, religious persons, put forward the impossible idea that the world, and the carnal body, are lying to us; that carnality itself is profane, and that the world is a great lie foisted on us to make us slaves to principles, principalities, and powers, that would lord themselves over us without the righteous souls who see through the ruse.
To perform this miraculous mental feat of seeing the body and the world for what they clearly are, requires a soul detached, to some degree, from the world and the body that house it. Otherwise, there's no possible reason a person could doubt their body, or the nature of their perceptions of the world. That would be impossible. It's the complete antithesis of what Theodore Schwartz is selling in his book, Gray Matters.
In total contradistinction to the religious mind Popper says is the source for scientific thinking, Schwartz claims that all of our thinking is based, totally, on the bells and whistle of our brain and its natural mechanisms. Were that true, it would be impossible to posit that the body is lying to us since there's no us for it to lie to. Which is why Schwartz, and his ilk, are desperate to do away with a soul, mind, or whatever you call it, that's able to ably question what otherwise cannot be questioned.
To say we're born-sinners merely means we're born into a body of sin, meaning a body that's created in ways designed to make us believe things that simply aren't true, things that would be impossible to question if we didn't transcend the sinful body "we" temporarily inhabit.
John
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