by Dick Stewart

Created on: May 18, 2009   Last Updated: May 19, 2009

Sin is a legacy we humans inherited from the first hominids who discovered that they could foresee the consequences of their actions.

The prevailing cultural metaphor for this event is the "Fall," as told in the Garden of Eden story. In it, the first couple ate of the fruit of the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil." In other words they become able to distinguish between "good" and "bad" consequences of what they do or fail to do.

They now knew that every action or inaction alters future events, sometimes beneficially, but always at a cost to someone or something - they had lost their innocence. Unlike animals, who only do what they must to survive and perpetuate the species, without thought to the effects of their actions on others, they now must weigh their behavior against some standard.

But no action or inaction is without negative consequences to someone or something. If you are to live, you must eat. If you eat, then what you eat must die. In finding and securing a mate, there is competition, and someone loses. Expand that into career development, business, sports, any area you can name, and someone, somewhere gets the short end of the stick. In the Judeo-Christian and Muslim traditions, it even extends to competition for the favor of the creator, as depicted in the story of Cain and Abel.

The result of this realization, that your very existence is harmful to something, leads to existential guilt, the feeling that there is within you a "badness" that you are powerless to expunge. The prevailing cultural name for this "badness" is Original Sin.

Original Sin simply institutionalized our existential guilt. Moreover, through religious law, it removed our personal responsibility from the decision process. In that way, it provided us with guidelines under which to conduct our lives such that even if we do harm something by our actions, we have an excuse: "God told me to do it."

The problem with this solution of course, is that the harm remained, so the guilt did, too. Moreover, No religious code can account for every eventuality. Levitican law makers could forbid us to bear false witness, but they could not be expected to anticipate a nasty rumor posted on MySpace.

So Christian theologians had a brilliant inspiration. They dredged up an old pagan tradition: appease the gods with a human sacrifice. Since this was not some one-time attempt to win a battle or stop a volcanic eruption, they needed to pump it up with steroids, so they made this human the Son of God, thus appeasing God by sacrificing his "son," a strange way to curry favor, you'd think.

But this is religion. So bizarre twists of logic are to be expected, like the fact that this human Son of God is also God Himself, so you could say it's a weird kind of suicide; and anyway, how can it be a sacrifice if the "Lamb" is now alive?

It doesn't matter. What counts is that believers have faith that through this convoluted theology (Accept Christ as your Lord and Savior and your sins are washed away.), they at last have a way to expiate their existential guilt, even if the consequences of their actions don't actually go away. They can't live without "sin," but they can dump them all on someone else, and God told them they could.

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