Original Sin - Dissecting Literalism

There are several philosophical paradoxes with the concept of original sin as advocated by Christians these days. The first of which derives from the vaunted problem of evil. God is allegedly the creator of all and is thus responsible for the creation of everything that exists. God is also allegedly omniscient, thus it knows the outcome of every eventuality. Thus, if the Genesis story of the expulsion from Eden were literally true, God created Adam and Eve knowing their eventual choice. God created the temptation as well, knowing their choice. Even if you try to blame the "fall" on Lucifer or some kind of trickster, God is the one that made such a trickster being and then left it around his human children to "corrupt" them. Then there's the issue of humanity not knowing shame, nor good, nor evil and living like animals before the fall. If this was the case, then mankind cannot be held morally responsible for the supposed fall from grace. God eternally punishing mankind for this "trespass" is akin to beating your dog because you told it not to eat the remote control. You told the dog verbally not to eat the remote control before you left, but the dog has no sense of morality and doesn't comprehend the meaning of an oath or a promise. Understanding moral concepts like obligation and honor are the result of a moral compass, which according to doctrine did not exist at that time in the garden of Eden.

So if the bible is to be taken literally, we either have to assume that God is either abusive and cruel or that he intended for humanity to fall. If the fall was intended, was it really a fall at all? Or perhaps it was an awakening to the realities of empathy and responsibility. In this scenario, either the bible is an imperfect translation of God's thoughts and intentions, or God itself is the trickster being. Think about it like this. God manifests a world that upon close scrutiny appears to be the result of ancient natural forces like evolution and geological transformation. But God's "true" book of history (the bible) asserts that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Then we are faced with a choice in order to reconcile the world we live in with the spiritual world. Either creation itself is a massive lie, or the Bible cannot be taken as the literal word of God. If God created the world to appear billions of years old, and manifested an illusion of evolution, then God is the most twisted trickster deity in all the pantheon. Loki better look out, YHWH is on the loose.

Most Christians and Jews already have found the way out of this paradox. What is a day to God? A day to God could be millions of years to us. This is a great first step toward non-literal interpretations of Genesis. Another answer to this is that on the first day when God created light, there was no earth. Thus there was no rotation of a planet to define a day. Thus how could there have been a "first day" before there was an Earth?

Now we get to the toughest point, the absolute and incomprehensible brilliance of the creator of the universe. If there is a god brilliant enough to manifest all of this reality, then surely such a being is literally beyond our understanding. That includes our written languages. How could we assume that our languages even have the capacity to describe God, or the will of God? It seems to me to be the ultimate declaration of hubris to assert that you know definitively what occupies the mind and history of God. How can such a being's infinite thought processes be condensed into something as archaic and limited as human language? We barely have the skills as a species to describe our own situation in the universe without inventing a language of mathematics to describe creation and utilizing the power of metaphor and simile to express the non-literal contents of the human heart. Thus it should be no suprise that when mankind tries to channel the mind of God, they use the elegant skill of poetic language. Poetry is not meant to be taken literally. It is meant to express nuance that is beyond concrete linguistics. When Shakespeare writes that all the world is a stage, does he literally mean that there's a lighting crew just out of our perspectives? Does that mean that a literal curtain will drop from the skies to signal the end of the world-stage? Of course not. Does this non-literal interpretation make the spirit of Shakespeare's language any less "true?" Of course not. We can see the truth in poetic ideas without acknowledging their literal truths. We do it constantly. Saying I am "hungry enough to eat a horse" does not imply that I am so desperate that I will ask my butcher for horse meat, but the statement truthfully describes a real sensation.

We accept this easily with poetry because we are taught that it is to be dissected and analyzed in order to find greater truths. Why is it that our pious human brothers and sisters are incapable of seeing the truth in their bible without perceiving it as a perfect archive of historic events? The genesis stories of creation can be completely untrue in a literal sense, but this does not impede their poetic truth. One does not require the poet to create factually detailed diagrams for reality. When religious texts are written in poetic language, the idea of grafting literal history onto them seems archaic and backwards.

To add to all this metaphysical uncertainty, there is the problem of translation to consider. When Christians read the KJV, they are reading a document that has passed through many languages to reach its current form. It is an evolving document. There is a reason why Jews still teach Hebrew for reading the Torah (Old Testament) and why Islamists claim that to truly understand the Quran you need to read it in Arabic. There are nuances of language that are difficult to translate. Some words and ideas may literally translate over into English (or Greek or Aramaic), but in so doing this you miss a lot of the cultural baggage that comes with the originating language. This baggage likely forms the context of what is missing in a lot of translated religious documents. When considering the KJV, one has to consider its linguistic history before asserting such perfection of content. The documents in question passed from Hebrew to Aramaic, to Greek, to Latin, to English. Surely the content contains contextual and linguistic variations between the various translations. This alone shows that one translation of the document cannot be the perfect and complete word of God.

Now let's save that baby before we toss out all the bat water. Just because we've established that these stories are not literally true does not mean that they are without poetic meaning. The concept of original sin as discussed earlier is a foolish notion when interpreted literally that burdens the human species with unnecessary cultural neuroses. But when we bring this concept into the modern era we find that there are injustices that humans feed simply by being born in a human society. If one is inclined to disagree with US CIA coups in democratic governments over economic policies, then one could say that being born in the US brings its own form of original sin. Whether you agree with it or not, our taxpayer funds have paid for continued occupation of the Palestinian territory, coups (and attempted coups) in various countries, financial/military support for dictators, extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, elimination of due process rights, etc. As Americans, we all tacetly support these policies whether we agree with them or not. When I buy a laptop, it contains a trace element of a superconductor that is mined in countries without workers' rights, human rights, or environmental protections, yet here I blog away. In order to live a morally neutral life in any country, one would have to withdraw from society and live as anti-technological, communist hermit. I'm certainly not doing that, yet I am concerned with these issues. This is the original sin which I was born into. When I was unaware of any of these issues, I still worked, paid taxes in, bought gadgets, and fed the massive economy of the American empire. As such, I contributed (and still do in all these ways) to greater misery across the globe. The bible doesn't require its practitioners to commit suicide to rectify original sin, and thus my activism doesn't take the technophobic hermit approach. The truth inherent in the Bible's message about original sin is to realize the secondary ramifications of your actions and do something to offset that horrendous entropy, but don't withdraw from the world. Reform it from within.

Then there's the sexist perspective of the fall from grace story to consider. How can any woman advocate the literal interpretation of a story that claims that all human misery is the result of one woman's inability to listen to paternal authority. Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) do tend toward an unfortunate pattern of seeing women as somehow less in-control over their own actions and needing masculine authority to make good decisions. This can be seen in the more fundamentalist variations of these religions who claim that a woman's place is subservient to a man. The implication being that a woman is not morally capable of handling responsibilities other than child-rearing and home-making. If the modern world has taught us anything, it is that this notion of gender is antiquated and less than useful in a modern context. So why would a woman willingly accept the idea that they are incapable of making good decisions and are thus responsible for the suffering of all mankind? As far as theodicies go, this one just breeds gender neuroses when taken literally.

There are more than enough other incongruities in the Eden Expulsion story to show that it is merely allegorical exegesis rather than literal truth. One example is the idea that Adam and Eve are the first humans from which all other humans derive. If that is the case who beget Lilith? Who beget the humans outside of Eden that are referenced later in Genesis? Is our entire species then the result of a foundation of inbreeding or are we to take it that these are round 2 in God's creation of mankind? Perhaps one could say that this is an allegory for the first proto-humans interacting with the prior evolved sub-human species of hominids. Science fiction-addled minds might see it as intervention by a higher order intelligence (non-deity related).

I always got a kick out of Terrence Mckenna's assertion that the tree of knowledge was actually a hallucinogenic mushroom. It would certainly make a fine forbidden sacrament capable of opening one's mind to empathy. He has an elaborate allegorical interpretation of all this that is delightfully pagan, but probably just as flawed as the pious interpretation. But still, a myth is useful because it becomes a prism of truth through which history is refracted. The good ones become somewhat timeless and find the relevence evolving to modern times. All the Abrahamic religions are capable of meeting the challenge of adaptation for the new centuries. The message of Joshua Ben Joseph (Jesus for all us goys), has evolved since the moment of the first plethora of gospels and will likely continue to do so until its relevancy slips away in some future landscape where metaphors about human sacrifice, shepherd deities, and annointed kings is incomprehendable to societal experience. The spiritual mind of humanity evolves in parallel with its biology, and I eagerly await the coming developments.

playing with textures

I'm just playing around on this one. Nothing serious intended.

More Golem Empire art

This one is a series of designs for a contract mercenary. His mask gives him a real-time HUD for targeting and access to ethereal networks.

This is a design for a 21st century infantryman carrying a nanite-enhanced collapsible blade and advanced body armor fabric. These guys are the unfortunate folks who end up first meeting the Fugue.