Original Sin

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In protestantism, and especially christian fundamentalism, the concept of *original sin* which they refer to colloquially as The fall of Man is reinforced to convince people that they have a permanent debt to God and so they must spend their entire lives "paying off that debt" by being submissive and sacrificing their individual needs and wants for the benefit of society.

Last edited by Haliphron on 04 May 2009, 5:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I would go on a christian forum for questions like this.
A lot of these people here are wrong. Go somewhere you can learn nothing but the truth like I've told you.

Care to share with us what you know about sin? What is the proper(or shalll I say biblical)definiton of sin??

I think Dussel and Magnus are the only ones in this thread who have come anywhere near my understanding of original sin. I have always understood the concept to be that we are all subject to original sin...a state of which we are born inherently sinful.

Gender is merely social. Sex refers to biological matters.
My understanding of the sexing of creatures is that the female is simply that creature which provides the greater contribution of physical material to off-spring. The ova is larger than the sperm.
So only when there is sexual differentiation can femaleness or maleness exist. Adam in the analogy would be sexless and is not an actual individual but a stage of evolution. Eve is simply the introduction of sexual differentiation based in large part from reproduction of the earlier forms but with some differentiation, rather than a particular life-form, and again (in the analogy) represents an evolutionary stage rather than an actual individual.

There is no biological male or female in the universal absence of sexual differentiation, and gender is social. The bible records information in ways retrievable to humans who are social creatures, that understand their world through social constructs such as gender. That God has a sex identity might be assumed by people, but that does not mean that God has gender/sex characteristics, or believed that humans could or in the near future (as humans reckon time), would have the means of understanding single cell life forms, the absence of sexual differentiation, or that their gender constructs around femaleness were entirely off-base. Indeed, it took nearly two thousands from the death of Christ before human technology approached clarification of these issues, and the OT proceeds the NT chronologically.

The greater problem to me would be reconciling the above possible just-so-tale with biblical assertions about femaleness taken as whole. But that was not what the OP asked people to do.

FYP

If there's a rule against me cussing, there should be a rule against blatant arrogance.

Too subjective. It's pretty easy to figure out when someone is cursing, but different people have different impressions of what seems arrogant.

When I was a child, my family was catholic. They converted to an evangelical denomination when I was a teen. This presented me with an inside look at two VERY different interpretations of original sin.

From what I remember of my childhood indoctrination, original sin was the act of Adam & Eve eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knoweledge. They broke God's rule, and they were banished from paradise. This "Fall of Man" is passed on through all generations, and must be washed away through baptism. Then, adherence to the strict moral life code must be followed, and any transgressions confessed, while remaining a faithful church member, and you can go to purgatory for an indefinite amount of time, and eventually be accepted into heaven. I'm paraphrassing of course, but that's what I remember.

As for the evangelical interpretation, the original sin is the same, but it is not that which keeps you from entering heaven. They say that Jesus is the only way to get to heaven, and all you need to do is accept him as your savior and your cool. They also did baptisms, but only for adults, as you needed to consciously accept it for it to have any meaning. Anyways, this was only a representation of cleansing, the only requirement for salvation was to accept Jesus. Of course this came with a lot of other stuff you had to do, like tithing and following a strict moral code, but you were supposed to WANT to do these things, because God was gracious enough to not torture you eternally if you accepted Jesus.

I sure would.


Sin is doing what is wrong or not doing what is right according to God's rules (1 John 3:4). If God says "Do not lie" and you lie, then you have sinned. If God says "Do not steal" and you steal, then you have sinned. According to God, sin separates you from Him (Isaiah 59:2).

The Catholic Church has a different concept regarding salvation: Salvation is in the Catholic sense the result of being a member of the church, divine forgiveness of sins via the means of the church and of good acts. For a Catholic follower it is necessary to maintain certain acts all his life (going to mass, confession, charity, etc.). A sin is something is only of relevance if no indulgence or absolution has been given - which could be done even in the very last moment of life, but the most sins do not follow in an absolute denial of salvation, but into a time in purgatory; also the time in purgatory can be shortened via reading mass for the soul or other means.

Evangelical churches see the faith as the sole way to salvation. So if your are faithful you will get salvation regardless your actions. The idea is that the action would follow the faith.

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You see two absolute different concepts.

this is what i think happend, an alien came here and genetically engeneeried himself with us. it wasnt supose to get serious and mans wasnt ever supose to think. so it got out of hand of course because im shure god makes mistakes too, or at the very least he can change his mind. so maybe he made us. regreted it, and planted the seeds of sin into our minds. and we belived it because well humans are naive. and gullible. and told how we were all unworthy of his love or whatever. so we sinned when we ate the apple but what really happend was we didnt.. someone just regreted making us, and sold us lies