Objectivism & Original Sin

[TheTrendyCynic]

I'm in the midst of exploring the philosophy of Objectivism. You may gather from my avatar and my signature that I'm quite the fan of Ayn Rand's unconventional wisdom. I'll be bringing up Objectivist morality in a few threads as I learn more about it, but it's too involved a subject to quickly summarize it here. To learn the basic tenets of Objectivism in just a few pages of reading, written far more concisely than I'd be capable of, click here.

Ayn Rand's most famous book, Atlas Shrugged, is the revelation of her philosophy told through the fictional story of a transcontinental railroad company. Later in the novel, her philosophy is dictated in great detail by a principle character. One element of this dissertation involves the Christian ideal of Original Sin and the Garden of Eden. I've exerpted it below (Moderators, if there are policies I'm unfamiliar with prohibiting lengthy exerpts, please delete this thread and let me know so I can re-post after I have a chance to summarize it in my own words):

The name of this absurdity is Original Sin.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge -- he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil -- he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor -- he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire -- he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy -- all the cardinal virtues of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was -- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love -- he was not man.

Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain -- and they point at the torture rack to which they've tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth -- and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

Powerful stuff, and a section that resonated with me as being so piercingly true. What kind of moral code punishes people for things over which they have no control? What kind of moral code demands penance on Earth for bliss in heaven? What kind of moral code sacrifices life on the altar of death by demanding an investment of your existence on Earth for a pay-out you only receive after you're buried?

And why has it taken almost two thousand years for someone to figure that out?

 

[Scott1]

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't feel punished by my sinful nature... I feel blessed.

My ability to sin is God's greatest grace (in my opinion)... to freely choose to love God in a world chock full of misery and devoid of any 100% evidence of God has been my greatest joy.

I know it comforts you somehow to post things like this.... and I pray it brings you joy.

Scott

 

[Scuba Pete]

It's probably why I don't believe in Original sin... they've all been done before!

 

[oracle]

Yah, original sin is a doctrine of self-condemnation. We are here to learn, to make mistakes, to experience, to grow. There is no logic in original sin. We are born with limitations, so we can exercise free will. All sin is the same, there is no such thing as an original. They all have the same agendas and motives, and that is selfishness.

The Garden of Eden is symbolic. If we never left that Garden, we would be forever condemned. The "perfect state" was a unified state of consciousness, unaware of it's own being. The "fall" is the seperation from this unified state, in which we gain self-awareness and self-will. The "fall" is a self excursion from point A to point B, from nonentity to self identity, infinity to finity. The garden is like without spacetime, a singularity, zero point energy, inactivity. It is like sleeping for an eternity. The "sin" was becoming self-aware, gaining self-identity, self-will, limitations: like awakening from eternal slumber. In this abstract analogy, consider a mother's womb to be the garden, and the world Eden, into which you were expulsed from your mother's womb to experience a world of pleasure and pain. To call this a sin, condemns your birth and life itself.

Yuck...

They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs,

Psychologically, this causes a bipolar effect in a person's personality. You don't oppress your "sinful" nature and condemn it. Such a thing psychologically has negetive repercussions. It's like slapping and beating yourself in the face for being human. You have to forgive and love yourself no matter what mistakes you've made, not condemn yourself. This is the cause of a mental fallacy, that God is a finite being that burns souls in hell. Evil is just an illusion: hell is something you create and likewise sin. It is isolation and seperation, the consequence of selfish actions. It is an emptyness, a void, self-division and self condemnation, a disconnection. All the while God is wholeness, a unification, a connection between all living things and everything that exists. It is Oneness and the totality of existence, whereas the Self is just a small point of differentiation.

And why has it taken almost two thousand years for someone to figure that out?

I'm sure that people already have, it's just that we don't share it. 1000 years ago, people that figured this out would have been deemed heretics and therefore be persecuted. I'm sure some early church fathers went against the doctrine of "Original Sin" before they were deemed heretics by the political minority. Things such as the inquisition wouldn't have allowed such topics to surface.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

You may gather from my avatar and my signature that I'm quite the fan of Ayn Rand's unconventional wisdom.

The cult of the personality raises its ugly head. I think I'll wait till you counterpose objectivism with humanism, but you'll want to read O. E. Wilson first.

 

[TheTrendyCynic]

I know it comforts you somehow to post things like this.... and I pray it brings you joy.

It's probably why I don't believe in Original sin... they've all been done before!

The cult of the personality raises its ugly head.

:banghead3

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't feel punished by my sinful nature... I feel blessed.

How you feel isn't relevant to the point being made -- the point is that it is an illogical absurdity for a moral code to weigh life in favor of evil and set humanity along a life-long struggle with death as its only purpose.

I'm sure that people already have, it's just that we don't share it.

A good point; I agree with everything else you wrote too, at least from the perspective of criticizing the nature of Original Sin. We appear to be on the same side in this thread -- when I familiarize myself a bit more with the details of Objectivism I'm sure I'll be posting some things we'll disagree on, and I look forward to that