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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30748 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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One day I need to make a top level comment about uses and abuses of the term 'original sin'. Calling anything and everything bad that involves guilt a form of original sin is distressingly common, and like the 'wokeness as religion' metaphor I think it's usually a bad metaphor that tells us almost nothing about wokeness or guilt, but what really drives me crazy is that it seems to be made in almost-complete ignorance of what original sin actually is.

I realise that theological literacy is pretty low even among Christians, and maybe I shouldn't expect secularists to know much better, but if this analogy is going to be so dominant, we can at least take the time to explore it a bit further.

I'm a former missionary kid with more theological and biblical training than most pastors. What's your criticism?

You wrote a lot (and I have theological training) but what is wrong with this comparison. You gave zero analysis of what is actually wrong with it.

Before you make a top level post you should make a basic post on why the comparison is wrong.

I would say the difference is how far you extend the concept of original sin into its Christian context before applying the analogy.

Let's say you describe original sin narrowly as follows: "When you first came into being, the weight of original sin was already upon you. It exists both prior to and independent of any moral choices that you might make."

I think that definition works in both a Christian context and a woke context. But if you broaden the scope of discussion to things like "where did original sin come from," "is there a solution to original sin," "is original sin something that is universal among humanity, or only a subset thereof," etc., then you start getting severe divergences between the two contexts, and the analogy quickly breaks down.

That said, I believe that the analogy based on the narrow definition is on point, and the surrounding differences may also be usefully contrasted.

Original sin is both guilt and temporal consequences for sin- so people after original sin deal with guilt for Adam's disobedience, and with all sorts of imperfections introduced, both the punishments written in the bible but also disease, physical imperfection, and inclination towards evil.

This is, superficially, pretty similar to how particularly extreme wokes view "whiteness". That this view is bullshit has nothing more to do with the metaphor than whether or not all human beings are descended from a literal Adam and Eve who lived in a garden in southern Iraq 6,000 years ago. I mean there's obviously differences- original sin doesn't apply to whites only, for example- but it's not a terrible metaphor and is often used by the wokes themselves.

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