Most educated people I know are uncomfortable with the idea of sin. They’re fairly sophisticated in their understanding of human psychology, and they recognize that people’s bad behavior is often rooted in childhood abuse or in chemical imbalances in the brain. Do these people who commit even the most heinous crimes choose to do evil, or are the programmed by forces outside their control? Is it that they have chosen to do evil, or that for them to have chosen differently would have been a remarkably heroic act?
How can these people be held accountable for their individual evil acts if they are part of a system that programs them for it? That's hard to argue against, and I have no intention to do so. For me the idea of sin is not very robust if it is only a matter of individual responsibility. There is individual responsibility, of course, but I think we better understand what it is if we frame it in this context of collective complicity in the regime of fallenness into delusion.
I think that most people's idea of sin is enmeshed with the social psychology of superego and taboo which have more to do with social order than with the deeper reality of good and evil. Sin is thus perceived as a social construction rather than a metaphysical condition, and if it's a social construction, our ideas about it have more to do with arbitrary, culturally determined hangups than they have to do with the deeper reality of good and evil. In this view, if we are programmed for evil, it's the result of bad social engineering and can be remedied by engineering something more functional. This view leads on the one hand to Mao's cultural revolution or on the other to Skinner's box.
And for many the word just has a lot of baggage from their childhoods that they would rather not carry around. So they have put it down and walked away from it, and I understand that. And yet the idea points to an existential truth that we cannot deny if we are honest. If evil is real, we're all complicit. How do we talk about that in a way that makes sense? We have the choice either to come up with another word that describes this condition or to retrieve the older word and reframe it in a way that is relevant to our currrent cirucumstances. I'm taking the latter tack.
There may be lesser and greater degrees of complicity, but we are all complicit. At the deepest level it’s not about indvidual responsibility; it's simply the condition of being born on the earth. If we are all in this together, it starts with a recognition that we are all born into the same conditions, into a world ruled by the Regime of Delusion. And it is from this regime of delusion and futility that all creation longs to be liberated.
And it begins with our waking up to to two facts: First that we are deluded, and secondly that we can be delivered from this condition. Both the western and eastern spiritual traditions look at our life in this world as a bad dream from which we must wake. The tradition of pagan naturalism would counter that if it's a dream, it's the only dream there is, and so we must therefore make the best of it. I see the spiritual traditions and the naturalistic tradition as not opposing one another, but supplementing one another, and I'll explain how another day. Right now I want to talk about rehabilitating this old idea of original sin from the western spiritual tradition.
I’m for retrieving the idea of Original Sin as a way of describing our condition here as denizens of the earth because it helps us to frame what the task is. We have the choice to be either collaborationists with the bad dream regime or to wake up and join the resistance.
But if resistance calls for individual courage and determination, it is not a struggle that can succeed if undertaken alone. That’s what churches are for, and I would say that any given church body on the local level or denominational level has authority and credibility to the degree that it promotes resistance and liberation in the way I speak of it here. It fails to the degree that it functions as a collaborator. And let’s face it: none of the historical churches, especially my own, has a historically unambiguous record on that count.
But I like this metaphor of resistance vs. collaboration because of its a this-world rather than other-worldly focus. It points us away from the idea that we are exiles longing for a home far away. It points us toward redefining our situation as citizens in our own land involved in a multi-generational struggle to reclaim what has been occupied by the enemy. The task is not to find a way to escape, but to stay and fight. The goal is not to get off the planet and into the Godhead, but to stay and engage the enemy like savvy guerillas. To be agents of liberation on behalf of him whose purpose is the liberation of the world.
I like the metaphor, but I also see its limitations. The abolitionist John Brown probably thought of himself as such a guerrilla, as do those nowadays in the Christian Aryan Nation. How often have people set out to subvert the regime of delusion only to become its unwitting agents?
In Tolkien’s saga, Boromir is a valiant freedom fighter who in seeking to subvert the regime becomes the evil he seeks to defeat. He seeks to play the power game on power’s terms, and even if he wins he loses. We all would like to be dashing Boromirs, but the task of resistance is more Frodo-like--unpretentious, out of sight. The task is as much about what we refuse as what we choose.
The subversion of the regime must call upon resources from outside the system, or even in victory the new regime just winds up becoming like the old one. It’s just the old story of king of the hill, one buck endlessly displacing the one before him. Everyone of them believes he's bringing something new, but it's always the same old thing.
It’s not enough simply to be against the bad guys out there; we are continuously struggling with the the self-deluding part of ourselves which is always coming up with the most noble rationalizations for doing the wrong thing. And so if you don’t have a robust concept of sin as one of the basic organizing principles of the world we live in, chances are you’re not really grasping the gravity of the situation. Chances are good that you will either be unwitting collaborators, or like Boromir, defeated by the way the regime has established its delusional rule in each of our souls. You have to understand the nature of he enemy if you are to develop effective strategies to defeat it. And if you are to have any chance of success, you have to know what are the resources that will sustain you in the struggle.
If people still feel uncomfortable with the idea of Original Sin in the way I describe it here, it’s probably because they have a sensibility that is shaped by the pagan naturalism that is at the heart of the Enlightenment secular outlook, which in turn is at the heart of what it means to be a modern. The idea of Original Sin is for them an answer to a question they don’t have. It explains nothing. How could it if one believes that there is nothing that transcends the world as we experience it with our five senses. What we see is what we get. The idea of Original Sin and our need to be liberated from it is all make believe. It might be lonely and terrifying to think that we are these beings who have come into self-awareness in this cosmic void, but grow up, get over it.
But that Enlightenment secular outlook has been breaking down for some time now. It had to sooner or later because it is way too one sided in its emphasis on rationality and in the way it denies the validity of so much human experience as "irrational." Reason in the end is simply a tool of the will; it gives its user the answers he wills. If one's will is fundamentally materialist in its orientation, he will accept only materialist answers to life's big questions. But materialism is fundamentally an irrational commitment or an unconscious prejudice.
I have the deepest respect for people who have made a commitment to materialism in full consciousness and live within such a mental framework with ruthless honesty. Nietzsche and Camus are both noble souls in this respect. There are others, but these two mean the most to me. Nietzsche is for me the great exemplar of this kind of ruthless honesty, and there is such depth and beauty in so much of what he has written. He was a great freedom fighter, but in the end he was a Boromir figure defeated by the regime of delusion against which he so valiantly struggled throughout most of his life. The nimble spirit that speaks from the pages of Camus, especially in his essays, likewise expresses a powerful spirit of resistance. I respect that spirit of resistance to conventional delusionism.
My attempt to retrieve and rehabilitate the idea of Original Sin is to give a name to that which they were resisting. You don’t have to be a believer to be a resistor, but I do think there are advantages. And I feel a deeper kinship with these unbelievers than I do the Dobsons, Fallwells, and Robertsons, whose brand of Christianity is collaborationist through and through. More in Part III.