{"id":11047,"date":"2026-06-15T11:21:41","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T19:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/?p=11047"},"modified":"2026-06-15T18:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T02:30:11","slug":"original-sin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/archives\/11047","title":{"rendered":"Original Sin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

People will say, I no longer feel like myself<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s because many years ago a large portion of the physical you was somebody else. Blood, guts, skin, bone, fat and muscle, all that stuff that makes you, you<\/em>, has turned over countless times. Only the tissues of the brain, eyes, and heart are durable throughout life. God, it is claimed, founded humanity on Adam and Eve, as fully formed adults. If the account in Genesis is to be believed, Adam lived to be 930 years old (Genesis 5:5). Adam was 130 years old when his third son, Seth, was born, well after he and Eve had succumbed to the temptation of the serpent and were exiled from Paradise. That’s a lot of cell division! We would expect that at various times throughout his long life, Adam, too, may have lamented that he no longer felt like himself; indeed, that he felt reborn in a sense, many times over. Who wouldn’t? Possibly seeking a return to Paradise in his later years, he might have appealed to God that he was no longer that same person who disobeyed an order hundreds of years earlier. Biologically speaking, he would have had a point. And yet, evidently, God was having none of it. He would have reminded Adam that sin originates in the brain. He would have emphasized that by His Own Design the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the cells of memory, thought, and the sense of personality – neurogenesis aside – persist indivisible throughout a person’s life. Once a sinner always a sinner. All your descendants shall be cursed to inherit your Original Sin, Adam. And the same goes for your wife, too. So own it<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world would never be the same<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Seth was born a sinner? Yes, so the story goes, and everyone since, meaning of all of humanity. This requires a little unpacking, though. Perhaps you’re familiar with the phrase: The Sins of our Fathers? In Christianity, what inheriting Original Sin really means is that the newborn has inherited the guilt<\/em> associated with the Original Sin committed by Adam and Eve, and being that this guilt is an inherited trait (according to canonical church teaching), passed down to all children since the dawn of man, it must, of course, be encoded in the newborn’s DNA (somewhere). In genetics, if 100% of the carriers of a DNA variant develop the corresponding disease, this is referred to as complete penetrance. Original Sin is an example of complete penetrance because every descendant of Adam and Eve – all of us, so the story goes – possess the trait of Original Sin at birth. However, according to Christian doctrine, there’s a cure, sort of. The infant afflicted with Original Sin may be baptized. Baptism is magical in the sense that the infant, spiritually, and biologically speaking, is cured, reborn. Baptism is seen as a kind of chemotherapy for the soul, I suppose is the way most Christians understand it. However – and here things get a little weird – while Baptism washes away the ancestral state of disgrace, according to canonical church doctrine it leaves behind in the infant the “tendency or weakness to sin.” In essence, baptism washes away the ancestral disgrace (Sins of the Fathers) but leaves behind the propensity of the baptized person to sin in the future. Getting baptized only removes the inborn sense of disgrace. Without that, the infant would grow up in a state of disgrace feeling as though she had committed the Original Sin herself. Surely, that would be a cruel curse of an unjust God. This segues us to the concept of Concupiscence<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

HW, raised Catholic, assures me she has never heard this term, or during her formative years learned what it means. It is, however, a concept central to the canonical teaching of both Protestant and Catholic churches, in terms of what baptism actually achieves, which so far as I can tell differ in their respective, abstruse descriptions of the metaphysical state the infant is left in after baptism. The differences need not concern us. Suffice it to say, both churches take seriously Concupiscence – that tendency or weakness to sin – as a constitutive vulnerability a person has throughout life, even if baptized. The concept is referenced at least three times in the King James bible. So what’s the big deal? The big deal, at least in my mind, is that baptism does not restore the infant to a state of grace before God. Baptism is merely a hall pass, it doesn’t get you out of school. And the propensity of a baptized person to sin in the future is held in check by another mysterious, corporeal endowment that Christians (especially, but not only) believe human beings possess, the exercise of free will<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So as with chemotherapy, baptism doesn’t kill all the disease, the cure is short lived, babies grow up and may recur, the sin comes back. If your cancer recurs it’s not your fault. If you sin, though, the church will say it is your fault because you have free will. Free will means a human being is able to choose among alternative futures. If you choose<\/em> to do a bad act, go against God’s will, you have sinned. It’s as simple as that. Recovery is still possible, but not through baptism, that’s a one time thing. You have to ask God to forgive you, repeatedly as often as the sin recurs, and, so the story goes, if you’re sincere, usually he will. If you die before asking God for forgiveness, bad things await you<\/a>. This is why newborns are quickly baptized, to vanquish the Original Sin<\/em> in case they should die before they are able to beseech God themselves to forgive it. If an infant is not<\/em> baptized and dies suddenly, these are seen as edge cases; most church leaders will punt and say it’s God’s call if the child goes to heaven or hell<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not without my critics on this. And I don’t mean Original Sin or its ramifications for a human life. I mean free will, or, for that matter any definition of will that proposes the material existence of a ‘judge’ or ‘volunteer’ in the brain, apart<\/em> from the physical brain. For billions of people the sense (Seemings) of an act willfully chosen, of possessing agency, volition, the ability to choose among alternatives and thus change the future (if only locally), what have you, is viscerally felt, experienced<\/em>. There is a large class of human actions that these same people will concede require no will, that don’t feel to us we had agency in causing. Such actions they will admit are automatic, instinctive, require no conscious thought to carry out. Yet somehow when the outcome of an action is good, well, then suddenly this is because of agency, choice, volition, my<\/em> will, me me me, I did that! Which, for an Epiphenomenalist<\/span> like myself, is nothing more than grandstanding, the chemical brain showing off, in effect manipulating you, the corporeal host, as its cheerleader. Weird as it seems there is at least some material evidence<\/span> for this theory of mind. Of course the same phenomenon is in play when an outcome is bad. Except when you do something bad, now it’s: sorry “I<\/em>” did that. Let the moralizing begin. Set in motion the means of Justice!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no organ in your body which, when it is dysfunctional, any sane person would claim is your <\/em>fault, your <\/em>error, you<\/em> are the most proximate cause. Likewise, nobody would struggle to admit that the function of most organs in the human body is involuntary, that is, no willful thought is required to sustain the function, because it’s automatic (heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, etc.). And yet, somehow, a human being is<\/em> the most proximate cause of the physical chemistry of one organ, the brain! Whether it functions to produce good or bad outcomes, no matter. Voil\u00e0! Epistemically speaking, that sounds suspiciously derivative of the claim of Original Sin, and equally unworthy of anyone’s serious consideration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People will say, I no longer feel like myself That’s because many years ago a large portion of the physical you was somebody else. Blood, guts, skin, bone, fat and muscle, all that stuff that makes you, you, has turned over countless times. Only the tissues of the brain, eyes, and heart are durable throughout […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wikipediapreview_detectlinks":true,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11047"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11070,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11047\/revisions\/11070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}