The Absurdity of Original Sin and Salvation
1999

I will demonstrate quicky and concisely the absurdity at the very heart of the Christian faith.  Why am I doing this?  Because it is such an action that a man might take towards a friend who still believes, at an adult age, in the existence of "Santa Claus".  Such a belief in an adult would hardly be considered healthy.  So why do people still believe in the foundation of Christianity, "The Fall of Man"?  I think it's because no one sets aside their fears and biases long enough to seriously and soberly think it through.  I have done so, and can honestly say that nothing could be more false than the idea of Original Sin and Salvation.

If you are a believer, a person of faith, I am going to ask you to do something that you've probably never done before. I want you to look at this story as if you are not a believer.  Do not look upon the Genesis account as you have always done, through the filter of faith, but with detachment and disinterest.  Read this story as you would any other book, and judge it on its own merits.

The Garden of Eden

Start by asking yourself one simple question. Why did God put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden?  What purpose did it serve?  Did God Himself need the knowledge of good and evil?  Did He have to take a piece of the magical fruit now and again to refresh His memory? Of course not.  Did any of the animals of the Garden need the Tree?  We can assume not.  What kind of tree was this?  An apple tree, an orange tree, a banana tree?  The bible does not tell us.  How could a tree-- an organism of wood and sap-- contain the "knowledge of good and evil"?  What capacity did it have for storing such knowledge, and how was that knowledge passed on by eating and digesting it?  Allow yourself to think about that…  Why, therefore, among all the useful and decorative trees in the Garden of Eden, did God deliberately include this tree, the tree that carries the warning: "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die"?

Did He put it in the Garden as a temptation for Adam and Eve?  The bible says very clearly that this cannot be the case. God does not tempt:  “Let no man say . . . I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man.”  (James 1:13)  So if God didn't put the tree in Adam and Eve's home in order to tempt them, why did he put it there?

Did God know Eve would eat the fruit? Of course He did!  We are told by the bible that God knows all things from the Beginning unto the End.  Did He not know Eve would give it to Adam?  Of course He did.  Did He not know that the serpent would tempt Eve?  He did, if we are to accept the bible. Therefore, did Eve have any freewill in the matter?  Could she have acted in a manner other than God had foreseen for her?  Of course not!  How could she?  How was the serpent able to speak? Did it give itself this remarkable ability? How does the mouth of a snake, with no lips or proper teeth, and no articulate tongue, form human words?  How did the tiny brain of a snake become wise and subtle?  Did the serpent make itself that way?  Who was responsible for putting the principle actors-- Adam, Eve, the serpent and the Tree-- all together in the Garden of Eden?  God, of course. The inescapable conclusion?  That He put all the pieces on the game board and enacted His own little drama, resulting in the deliberate and unavoidable eternal damnation of Humankind.  In the words of Robert Ingersoll: "Could a devil have done worse"?

That's like a caring, loving parent leaving a loaded pistol in the playroom of a five year old child, knowing full well what the result will be, and watching from a crack in the door as the child blows his brains out. This is the foundation of the Christian religion. It is utter nonsense.

But here is another problem. We are told in Genesis 3:14 that after the speaking serpent had completed the mission for which he had been placed into the Garden of Eden-- that of tempting Eve-- God cursed the serpent: "upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life."  (Does the devil have a finite life?) Why did God curse the serpent for carrying out the mission for which he was created? This implies that before the transgression, snakes had legs, which would have made them lizards. But lizards still exist today. So, somewhere out in the world, the Christian must believe, is a 6000-year-old talking snake that eats dust! (And they say that we're the irrational ones.) So, God's punishment to Satan for the damnation of humanity was being transformed from a lizard into a snake... so what! That's pathetic. If Satan was cursed by God to spend the rest of his existence as a serpent, then how does he reappear later in the New Testament, and take Christ up to the top of the mountain to tempt him?  How can this be? Did he release himself from the curse of God by his own power? What about the devil's activities in the Book of Revelation? If he is slithering around as a serpent, what is the great danger? Why doesn't someone simply step on him or cut his head off with a shovel? The whole story is revealed as a childish myth, to anyone who has eyes to see.

We are told that at their creation, Adam and Eve, like small children, did not posses the knowledge of good and evil, of right from wrong. I wonder why God wanted to withhold this from them... Did He want credulous and ignorant followers? But a far more important question arises here. Should Adam and Eve be held responsible for committing an action prior to them having the Knowledge of Good and Evil?  I would not think so. We do not hold certain people responsible for their actions, such as children or the mentally handicapped, because they did not know what they were doing was wrong, or had no conception of the ideas of right and wrong. Here, Adam and Eve disobeyed an instruction before they knew it was wrong to disobey.  They did not know about good and evil, right and wrong. They had no idea about the consequences of their actions (certainly they were ignorant of the "eternal" consequences for all their decendants). Was this the Ultimate Sin, for which every human being ever born was to pay with their eternal soul? I say no!  Was that the worse thing that Adam and Eve could have done?  Of course not. They could have beaten and slaughtered each other, and destroyed their paradise, burning it to the ground.  But they did not do anything so cruel or barbaric.  They ate a piece of fruit, contrary to the will of an arbitrary god.  People disobey God's commands millions of times every day all over the earth-- from lying and stealing to murder and worshipping other gods… so then why was Adam and Eve's simple disobedience to carry so heavy a price? 

It is written that God warned Adam not to eat of the fruit. It would have been fair of God to give Eve this same warning…but He did not.  He uttered it before He pulled out Adam's rib and made a whole woman.  We have no record of God or Adam telling Eve of this dreadful warning, so why should she be held accountable? God told Adam that the day he ate of the tree, he would surely die. What could that have meant to Adam, before he had knowledge of good and evil? He did not know what death was... he had never seen anyone die. It was a meaningless threat.

Would you treat your own children that way?  Would you condemn them to eternal torture, infinite revenge, never ending intense pain with no chance of pardon, for taking a cookie out of the cookie jar before dinner, after you had told them not to?  And would you condemn your children's children, and all generations that will come after?  What sort of justice is this?  No sensible person can condone this.  All that the Christians can say is that we cannot understand God's "method of justice".  That is all they can say. But then what does it mean to say that God is just, or that God is merciful? Such words no longer have any meaning.

Why should I be held responsible for Eve's decision to eat the fruit?  Why should you?  If your distant ancestor, four hundred years ago, killed a man in an act of cruel and pointless savagery, should you be handed a life sentence in prison for it?  God Himself states in the bible that He does not punish the children for the sins of their fathers.  Are we to conclude by this that we have no sin upon us as the result of our births?  No stain of eternal depravity upon us?  Might not the notion of Original Sin be the fabrication of the Church, in order that they might further their careers and ensure their survival?  For if one does not need to be saved, one does not need priests and preachers.  Christians tells us that without their religion, all of us are doomed without hope.  They try to convince us of the dilemma they have created for us, then try to convince us that they alone have the remedy.  Christianity cuts you and then tries to sell you a Band-Aid.

The Second Half of the Fable

Because of the Fall of Man, we are told that it is not enough that we are good and caring people, not enough that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us, not enough that we forgive those who trespass against us.  We must be baptized-- have our heads wet by a priest-- a meaningless gesture, and proclaim that we accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior.  We must believe the unbelievable.  A Hindu, who happened to be more charitable and humane than the best Christian, is nonetheless consigned to eternal damnation, just as the kind and gentle native of some tropical island who never heard of Jesus and his cross.

If, as the Christian doctrine teaches, the only way to salvation is through Christ, what became of all the souls of the people who died before Jesus' appearance on earth?  The answer can be found in Romans 2, where Paul tells us about a system of God's justice whereby people who lived without the knowledge of God were judged according to their works. He says: "For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves." Then he says in Romans 4:15, "Where there is no law, there is no transgression." So what we had before was a fully-functioning system of justice, and a good one at that-- one in which believers in Yahweh had to fulfill their end of the Covenant by sacrificing butchered animals, but where unbelievers, or believers in other gods, were judged on the virtue of their works. Why then, did God abandon a fair and perfectly-functioning system of judgment, replacing it with an unfair and unjust one, one in which "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned"?

Why do you suppose God waited so long to send Himself down in the form of Jesus in order to save humanity from Original Sin?  Why didn't Jesus appear in the generation immediately following Cain and Abel, when the number of persons on earth could be counted on one hand? Or he could have come after he killed nearly everyone in the world with the Flood. The task of convincing people that Jesus was in fact God would have been effortless. In such a scenario, every human ever born would have a much fairer chance of attaining salvation. Because of God's failure to do this, however, the vast majority of people who ever lived were doomed without hope.

Christians tell us that Christ died to absolve Original Sin, so that all who believe in him might be saved.  It is written that he came to earth in human form for the sole purpose of dying. Would it not then have been just as well if he had died of a fever, or of smallpox, or of old age, or from any other reason?  We all suffer in some sense, and we all come into the world for the ultimately sole purpose of dying.

If Jesus Christ was in fact God, and if he came into this world to suffer for us as Christians tell us he did, then the only real suffering he could have endured would have been to live. His existence on earth was a state of exile or banishment from Heaven, the most perfect place, and the only way back to the paradise that was his home was to die. Everything in this strange system of Christianity is the reverse of what it pretends to be.

The sacrifice of Jesus was no sacrifice at all, for a number of reasons.  First, according to the New Testament, Jesus Christ was God Himself.  What possible inconvenience could death represent for an immortal god?  None whatsoever.  God would have an infinite capacity for enduring physical pain. He would also have the foreknowledge that he would soon be back in heaven, his original country. Therefore, his sacrifice is no sacrifice at all. It's all a sham.

Is crucifixion the worst possible way to be put to death?  I say that it is not.  It is my opinion that burning to death by a slow roast  would have been far more painful.  Did Jesus suffer more than any person in history?  I say no. So, of what special significance was his suffering?  The Church should know all about causing pain and suffering, by the way, they did it enough.  Their devices of torture were state of the art.  Christ's suffering was nothing compared to those who disagreed with His Church. 

Additionally, Christ supposedly 'came back' three days later. So just what was sacrificed? It's not a sacrifice if you take it back.  And yet, the Christians claim Jesus made the most ultimate and perfect sacrifice.  Is there anything more absurd than this?

If in fact Jesus was God, and God is all powerful, then Jesus could have easily stopped his killers at any time. Therefore, the death of Jesus is more correctly labled as a suicide.

Christians claim that the price for sin was so high that Man could not pay it-- only God could pay the debt.  Like a father who assumes the debt that his son cannot pay, we are told that God allowed Himself to be sacrificed on the cross so that he can forgive us.  So, your child has just taken a cookie out of the cookie jar when he wasn't supposed to.  Now, to forgive him, you tell him:  “Take this hammer and these nails, and nail me up onto a piece of wood until I die.  Murder me, perform a human sacrifice, and then I'll forgive you for taking a cookie.”  The basis of Christianity is to sacrifice the guiltless in order to forgive those who did no wrong, for a crime that was no crime in the first place.

Imagine that a man had been convicted of murder, and was about to be electrocuted  The governor watches over the execution.  Now suppose that at the moment the switch was about to be thrown, someone in the crowd steps forward and says, "I am willing to die in the place of that murderer. He has a family, and I don't."  And suppose further, that the governor replies, “Step up, young man, your offer is accepted. A murder has been committed and somebody must be killed, and your death will satisfy the law just as well as the death of the murderer."  Is this situation acceptable to any civilized person?  Yet this is the Christian doctrine of sacrifice.  I say, let the guilty pay for their own crimes, and let the punishment fit the crime.  If I commit I crime, I will take responsibility for my own actions.

When is enough punishment enough?  How much will the God of Love inflict upon His children?  First there was the Fall from Grace.  That was supposed to be the ultimate punishment, when mankind became separated from the presence of God and cast out of the Garden of Eden.  When that did not succeed, God sent the Great Flood, and killed virtually every human on earth.  When that did not cleanse the world of wickedness, Jesus came to earth and taught mankind about the fires and torments of Hell.  This tactic is obviously failing, and we are told that even Hell is not enough punishment and suffering; for it is written that Armageddon and Judgment Day are yet to come. If God's justice was totally satisfied with the sacrifice of Jesus, as Christian Doctrine teaches, then why all the horror, torture and killing that is yet to come at Armageddon, where nearly everyone on earth, Christian and infidel, will be subject to pain, suffering and death?  The reason is that I suppose that once you have a taste for a certain habit, it is difficult to stop.  And Yahweh has certainly demonstrated that He has acquired that taste.

It is clear that Christianity is a gilded mansion built upon a foundation of sand.  It's basis is not only inexplicable, but illogical and immoral as well.  But, as people often say when faced with such conundrums that they can't talk their way out of: "God works in mysterious ways."

We are told that we must swallow this story, hook, line and sinker. We are told that God gave us the freewill to believe it or not believe it-- but this gift comes with a deadly threat. Believe it-- or be eternally damned. What kind of choice is that? Some people may be convinced that the threat is a very real one, and so they will believe any story that their preachers tell them. Under these conditions, some people can be made to believe anything at all.

Salvation is not awarded by doing good deeds, we are told by the church, but through belief alone. God can forgive all things, it is said, except disbelief. He will pardon the murderer of children, if he will fall down and beg for forgiveness, and if accepts Jesus Christ as his savior. But He will not pardon the person who uses reason and honesty, and who finally decides: "I just can't believe it." I am told that it doesn't matter how good of a person I am during my life, because at the end of it, I will be asked: "Did you believe the one about the Garden of Eden?"  I'll have to be honest and say, "No, I didn't. It was just too far-fetched... sorry."

According to story, God told Adam that on the day he ate the fruit, he would die. The serpent, however, told Eve that they would not die if they ate it, but that they would attain the knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, according to the bible, the first lie told to humanity was told by God, and the first truth told to humanity was told by Satan. For me, I cannot swallow it, no matter how much I am threatened. I can't help it.  It has to make sense to me... that's the way my brain works. If there is a god floating somewhere up in the vacuum of space, then he's sure to understand that.

If you do believe that tale, I'd have to ask you: WHY?