> CB: So you agree that it is not orginal [sin] with Luther and Calvin ?
Certainly. It's funny how revolutionaries keep some of the dogma and ditch others. L&C ditched several portions of the biblical text too... (which most modern-day protestants fail to notice when they claim that the bible in infallible, ie. which one?)
> KM: The word sin doesn't appear until chapter 4, in the Cain and Abel
narrative - so - here we go - sin is an idea completely foreign to the text.
> CB: To be precise, don't you mean the WIRD "sin" is not in the text ? The
IDEA of sin is not completely foreign to the act of disobeying the command
of God.
But chapter 4 is a later addition... so the concept of sin might not have been part of narrative, at least not in the sense that we understand the term today. So I'd question that the idea was there as well... but a biblical scholar would probably know more about this that I would...
> (KM) Basically, in the first 3 chapters of Genesis, there are two stories
that got merged into one - the first story came from people that lived near
water (ie. creation out of the watery abyss) - the second story a nomadic
people (ie. the garden of eden is an oasis). The second story simply provides
an explanation about why human beings have to work and suffer (why they can't
find that damn oasis).
> CB: Is all this in the text ? Or are you interpreting ?
Given that everything is interpretation... it is a historical reconstruction of how the text was put together (I'm assuming here that Moses wasn't the author of the first five books). If you go through the text fairly carefully you should be able to pull it apart line by line, based on different narrative styles and composition. The different "authors" literally jump out at you when you structure the text with traditional forms of oral presentation.
> CB: Again, my original point is that the two people mentioned in Yoshie's
post who were discussing irradicable evil seemed to be mimicing a real old
idea. It was not an old Jewish idea , but an old Christain idea. The Christian
idea was based on an interpretation of the text of Genesis, but as you say, it
was not based on these other textual bases of Genesis.
I think the text _Radical Evil_ from which the two essays comes, is an elaboration on Lacan's comment:
"The problem of evil is only worth raising as long as one has not fixed on the idea of transcendence by some good that is able to dictate to [human beings] what their duties are. Till that moment the exalted representation of evil will continue to have the greatest revolutionary value." (Lacan, Ethics, 70).
They are rethinking the idea of evil from a contemporary perspective... so all of their thoughts could be []'d with the comment, "the problem of evil is worth raising only *if* ..." Who knows, the idea of evil may have worn out its welcome, and along with it the idea of the good...
> As to the above, are you saying that the original story of Genesis does not
involve Adam or Eve violating an injunction from God ?
Yes, but this doesn't indicate "sin" - not as we know it. Remember, the deity in the text (the garden narrative), YHWH, was not taken to be a sovereign deity, just one of many... so even if the idea of sin isn't alien to the text, it doesn't have the same dynamic that it would in light of an omnipotent deity... or a good deity (deities, at the approx. time of the narrative, were not taken to be good or evil rather, just powerful beings, not unlike the Greek pantheon). So I'd still be careful to assume that "sin" is present in the text, transgression yes, punishment yes, but "sin" - maybe not, at least not in the traditional understanding of the term. It would be important to check the approximate dating of the garden narrative and the writing of chapter 4...
> (KM) Well, there are two parts: first, Augustine argued that people had free
will, and we should understand this to mean that Augustine thought people had
free will; second, that his argument, today, doesn't make sense. But this
isn't *his* understanding - he thought the argument worked... so if we're
going to talk about Augustine we have to see why he thought that instead of
putting the critique before the content.
> CB: Why did Augustine think that ?
Augustine argued that people had to be free, otherwise they can't be held responsible for sin. So Augustine starts with the idea that everyone is a sinner, then he retroactively tries to show that human beings, at some point, where free to decide. It wouldn't be 'just' for God to damn everyone if they didn't "choose" to disobey God... so he *must* (to preserve the idea of God as just) demonstrate that human beings are free and therefore responsible for their actions (Augustine is working with a Platonic / geometric idea of justice here. 1 punishment for 1 sin... the punishment for disobedience of divine commands, however, is infinite (ie. perfect justice)(since God's commands are perfectly good).
> > CB: Both believers in God and believers in the Devil are philosophical
> idealists, metaphysicians, non-materialists.
> Not true, you can believe that God has physical substance which is just really
> hard to locate - so contemporary theology is often materialistic.
> CB: This would be to use "God" in a completely unconventional way.
Hobbes was the first that I know of, but several mytics like John of the Cross and Tereasa of Avala (speling) and Meister Ekhardt (speling) also understood God in a similar way (I'm not sure about dates here, except with Hobbes). And contemporary process theology, not to mention Hegel, is similar as well. The idea that God is "wholly other" is a relatively new idea. For most theologians, God has always been someone who "walks with us."
> Evelyn Reed has an essay "Women and the Family: a historical view" in which
she suggests that women originated human social labor. If we think of culture,
language and symbols as essential in this , maybe the Genesis story in the
version with Eve originating the knowledge of good and evil ( symbols) is a
glimpse of Reed's hypothesis, but inverted as the original sin instead of the
original virtue.
I'm not sure that the origin of human social labour can be reduced to "men" or "women" (since these categories themselves have been socially constructed through labour). Matthew Fox, a defrocked Catholic priest, has a book, Original Blessing.... which is a flakey "new age" critique of original sin...
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