Original Sin
Dr Raven Dolick M.s.D.
Feb 13, 2016
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2016 RavenStar Enchantments
"Since humanity came into being, man has enjoyed himself too little. That alone is our original sin." ~ Nietzsche
Original Sin - also known as Ancestral Sin - does not exist in any other religion, including the two other Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam.
According to Islam, the Garden of Eden was located not on Earth but in Heaven. Iblis (Satan) tempted Adam and Eve to disobey God by eating of the forbidden fruit, and thus the couple were expelled from Heaven to Earth. (Did he provide them with a spaceship? Or did he "beam them down" using a Star Trek transporter? What about a magic carpet or three wishes by a genie? Why doesn't the Koran tell us?) So, humanity is being collectively punished for Adam and Eve's disobedience, hence in a sense this is equivalent to the concept of Original Sin. However, no Saviour figure such as Jesus Christ is required by Islam to reconcile humanity with God (showing that Christ is an unnecessary hypothesis and should therefore be rejected according to Occam's Razor). Rather, humanity simply needs to obey Allah, and he has told us exactly what is required via the Koran, given to us by his Prophet Mohammed. While Christianity is about placing your absolute faith in Jesus Christ, Islam is about placing your absolute faith in the Koran.
Although Judaism locates Eden on Earth (somewhere in Iraq or Iran), it shares the Islamic analysis of the Adam and Eve tale (or more accurately, Islam borrows the original Judaic interpretation): humanity is disobedient, hence is punished. If humans want to be saved, they must cleanse themselves of disobedience and obey God's rules and Commandments at all times, like good little automata.
Abrahamism argues that because God knows everything, he already had foreknowledge of what Adam and Eve would do. So, according to Abrahamism, God deliberately created humanity in the knowledge that he would end up sending most humans to eternal suffering in hell. If that doesn't make him Satan, Lord of Evil, then what does? What is Satan's purpose? - to lure human souls to hell where he will torture them forever! What is the purpose of God/ Allah/ Yahweh/ Christ? - to send all but a handful of souls to hell. So, what's the difference?
In Gnosticism, there's no such thing as Original Sin, and the snake in Eden is an emissary of the True God. Its purpose was to bring the precious gift of knowledge and consciousness to Adam and Eve, thereby freeing them from the Demiurge's tyrannical control. The Demiurge was furious when he discovered what had happened and expelled them from Eden because they were now a threat to him and no longer his mindless slaves.
Even within Christianity, the concept of Original Sin met with ridicule in some quarters. Christianity might never have become the monstrous doctrine that has brought so much misery to humanity if it had instead listened to the voice of sanity emanating from the Celtic monk Pelagius in the early fifth century. Pelagius attacked Original Sin and the associated belief that death and sexual lust were the result of Adam and Eve's "Fall". He denied that humanity required any divine grace in order to be good, saying that ordinary human nature was sufficient to recognise goodness and to do good and noble deeds that would merit a place in heaven. No supernatural intervention was required. St Augustine, on the other hand, argued that no human being could ever merit heaven no matter what they did. No human could do anything genuinely good. God, randomly, chose some to be saved and the rest (the overwhelming majority) to be damned, but there was nothing anyone could do to influence God's decision. Pelagius understood immediately that this was one of the most evil ideas ever devised. At a stroke, it removed all moral responsibility from humans and relegated good deeds to mere illusion.
Pelagius lost the debate and was condemned as a heretic, and thus Christianity lost its final chance to be a decent religion. It's easy to see why Pelagius lost. His version of Christianity had no need of the Church. People could save themselves by their own efforts. No one needed to be baptised and to regularly receive the sacraments. No one needed priests, bishops or popes. No one needed God's grace.
As a matter of POWER, not morality, Pelagius was rejected. And that was always the way it went in Christianity. Every time it was confronted by heresy, the Church chose the position that gave it the most power over men, and rejected the position that gave ordinary people power to save themselves. So it goes. All institutions follow the same ruthless and cynical strategy. The accretion of power is all that matters. All institutions reflect the Will to Power and will do anything to secure and increase it, regardless of morality or rationality.
The official position of Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, is that humanity is eternally depraved as a result of Original Sin and not a single person is able through their own natural powers to do anything at all to deserve salvation. Christianity thus reduces human beings to helpless vessels of sin, irredeemably damned unless God arbitrarily saves them. Any philosopher worthy of the name instantly realises that this renders Jesus Christ himself totally unnecessary since his "sacrifice" doesn't change a single thing about the human condition. We were inherently depraved before the Crucifixion, and inherently depraved after it too. God could simply have chosen to save some human beings and damn the rest without Christ ever having been born. It seems that the only function of Christ's death was to persuade God the Father to arbitrarily save a small number of human beings from hellfire. No one deserved to be saved, but, because of Christ, God the Father deigned to help some of us by bestowing grace on us. We didn't merit it - he simply randomly assigned it. In other words, Christianity has no moral dimension at all. No one can do good deeds without God's help. No one can believe in God without God's help. We have no moral responsibility because we are all intrinsically depraved and evil. We are all damned, but God in his great "compassion" throws the dice and saves those of us who get double six (or whatever other random criterion he chooses). We are not moral agents and we are not living in a moral world. Rather, according to Christianity, Earth is simply hell's waiting room, and may even be regarded as the outermost circle of hell. If you're alive on Earth, you will almost certainly be going to hell no matter what you do in your life. All the good deeds in the world won't save you if God hasn't marked you as one of the Elect. Only by having God's grace randomly and undeservingly conferred upon you can you avoid your fate.
So, the Christian God created the world in order to send almost everyone in it to hell, and yet billions of people actually worship this monster. What the fuck's wrong with them? How can anyone call this entity anything other than Satan? Is he not the King of Hell?
If you call yourself a Christian, you are committed to the following positions:
1. Death came from sin, not man's physical constitution (which was originally immortal).
2. Infants must be baptized into the Church to have any hope of being cleansed of original sin (outside the Church there is no Salvation).
3. Children dying without baptism go to hell.
4. The grace of Christ provides the strength and will to act out God's commandments, and without it there is no such strength and will.
5. No good works can come without God's grace.
Pelagius, the voice of sanity and reason, saw how deadly these notions were to human free will and morality. Christianity, like Islam, makes the Will of God responsible for everything. If God wills us to be good then we will be. If he does not then we will be evil, in accordance with our fallen nature of unremitting depravity.
Pelagius understood that Augustinian Christianity turned human beings into nothing but wicked automata, programmed for evil doing and incapable of transcending their inbuilt sinfulness.
Where Augustine declared, "Non possum non peccare" ("It is not possible to not sin"), Pelagius counterargued that anyone could obey the Commandments because God would not have given humanity Commandments that it could not keep i.e. God would not be so cruel and unjust as to give us impossible commands and then send us to hell if we failed to accomplish the impossible. He regarded Augustine's position as one of fatalism and predestination, removing mankind's free will. Had Pelagianism become mainstream Christianity, it would have been a much less toxic religion. But the bad guys (i.e. most of the "saints" - like St. Augustine) always won in Christianity.
Protestantism made Christianity even more hostile to Pelagius. Whereas Catholicism had sought to assign good deeds at least some merit, Protestantism reduced good deeds to having no value at all. For Protestants - the most deranged Christians of all - faith is all that matters, and only the grace of Christ can allow you to believe in Christ.
Protestantism may be called the Taliban wing of Christianity, full of extremist nutters. All the Greek philosophy that Catholicism had used to give it some semblance of intellectual credibility was ditched by Protestants who asserted that the Bible alone was all that a Christian needed. If it wasn't in the Bible, it could be safely ignored. And thus Protestantism became the religion for incredibly stupid people who loathed philosophy.
Pelagius
"Fanatics are picturesque. Mankind prefers to look at poses rather than to listen to reason." ~ Nietzsche
Pelagius was born in the British Isles, either in the border area of Scotland and Northern England or alternatively in Ireland or Wales. Thus he was a Celtic rather than Roman monk. For several centuries, Celtic Christianity operated differently from the Roman Church, before eventually falling into line at the Synod of Whitby in 664 CE. Had it been the other way around - had Rome succumbed to Pelagian Christianity - we would now be living in a much saner world.
It's one of the great tragedies of life that a great man can be thwarted because he happens to come up against an immensely powerful and manipulative enemy. Had St Augustine never lived, Pelagian Christianity may well have triumphed. As it was, Augustine proved an irresistible force and made the Church obey his will and declare Pelagius's position heretical.
Ironically, most Christians, especially Catholics, adopt a rather Pelagian approach to their lives in a practical day-to-day sense. St Augustine's vision of Christianity really does resemble a kind of severe mental illness.
Augustine's idea of Original Sin is right up there as one of the greatest errors and most monstrous ideas ever. He believed that death entered the world because of Original Sin and marked us all for damnation. It was the sin that defined the entire human condition. It transcended particular human beings and became universal, applicable to the whole of humanity in perpetuity. It was a cosmic event, a cosmic sin, outside the scope of mere history.
Why? Because it was the only way to make the life of Jesus Christ remotely relevant.
One of the most astounding aspects of the ferocious debate between Augustine and Pelagius is that both of them effectively did away with any need for Jesus Christ, though neither said that or even realised it.
In the time of Pelagius (and indeed in the present day), there were three Christian views of how the soul came into existence. According to Origen, souls pre-existed bodies and were assigned to them at conception or shortly thereafter. This view was deemed heretical (particularly because it implies reincarnation). According to Creationism - the position supported by Pelagius - God creates the soul at the moment of conception or shortly thereafter and assigns it to the body. Ironically, this has become the favoured view of the Catholic Church despite Pelagius being one of its advocates (interestingly, there is no definitive stance on this critical issue). The position taken by Augustine was called traducianism and this proposed that the soul was created by the act of conception i.e. your soul, like your body, is made by your parents and is a product of their two individual souls. Augustine thus makes damnation an STD - a sexually transmitted fatal disease. We inherit sin and death from our parents. It's part of our spiritual DNA.
The great advantage of this theory is that it makes any defects of the soul hereditary and thus it provides support for the transmission of Original Sin to all human beings. Creationism on the other hand would seem to make Original Sin impossible since it would require God to "inject" Original Sin into each new soul he creates. It would make him into an absolute monster, essentially sentencing each soul to hell even as he makes it. The Catholic Church, which defends the creationism theory of the soul, has not explained how it is compatible with the concept of Original Sin. Pre-existence of souls certainly isn't compatible with Original Sin since the souls existed prior to the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
Given the crucial importance of the soul to Christianity, isn't it extraordinary that after two thousand years it still doesn't have any viable explanation of how souls came into being? Faith certainly won't help them!
When Augustine argued the case for predestination - that God decides who will go to heaven and who to hell when the soul comes into existence - Pelagius rightly asked what was the point of believing if our fate had already been decided. He ought to have asked an even more explosive question - what function was served by Jesus Christ if everyone's fate was decided at conception?
Predestination, another of Augustine's pet theories, turns God into a monster who literally creates souls for the purpose of sending nearly all of them to perpetual suffering in hell. If that doesn't make him a cosmic psychopath what does? Why is Christianity so silent on this vital theological matter? In fact, it runs away from virtually all serious theological points. It hasn't got a clue how to answer them.
Augustine declared that humanity was "a mass of sin." So horrific was his view of human nature that he sentenced newborn babies to hell if they died before being baptised. (He thought that babies were in any case the very definition of selfishness. He said, "If infants do no injury, it is for lack of strength, not lack of will.") Of course, he is assuming that there is a connection between baptism and those who have been chosen to be saved by God, but, by his own account, he can't have any real idea of what God's criteria are for saving some and damning others, hence baptism is actually meaningless. It can't give you any guarantee at all.
There are actually two Christian Churches - the Church Visible and the Church Invisible.
The former comprises all ostensible Christians; all those who call themselves Christians and have been duly baptised and admitted into communion with the Church. As for the latter, they are the Elect, the Saved, those known to God alone. They are his sons and daughters upon whom he has conferred the gift of grace to save them from hellfire. No one on Earth can know if they belong to the Church Invisible. It is the most secret society of all. Even its members don't know they are its members.
Pelagius was horrified by the thought of a God who sent babies to hell who had done nothing wrong. He it was who proposed the idea that later became the concept of Limbo - a place where unbaptised babies that die in infancy go to that isn't hell proper, but rather a more benign place at its edge. It makes you wonder what these dead babies do for eternity.
Limbo has now been killed off by the Catholic Church, and it now states that it hopes the unbaptised dead babies are saved by God's "infinite mercy". One is temped to say this is the last "God" one would appeal to for mercy. When has he ever shown any?
The debate between Pelagius and Augustine could scarcely have been more profound. According to Pelagius, God gives us the tools to perfect ourselves and the free will to choose to exercise them or not. He does not make it impossible for us to be good through our own efforts.
Augustine on the other hand maintained that God perfects some of us by act of divine grace, which is all about him and nothing to do with us. "Grace", one of the most lunatic ideas ever devised, is described as the free and unmerited love and favour of God. Well, if it's unmerited then there's nothing we can do to earn it. The Catholic Church claims that its sacraments confer grace on us, but how can they if there's nothing we can do to merit grace? The Protestants abandoned the idea that grace came from the sacraments offered by the Church and instead concluded that grace came directly from God to the Elect.
If God chooses not to bestow grace on you then he has damned you to hell, regardless of the type of life you lead, good or bad. You have absolutely no control over any of this, and no say in it. You're in the ultimate lottery: heaven for the random winners and hell for the equally random losers. You can't even pray to influence the outcome. You can't do anything. Your free will, if not entirely illusory, is in any case useless. It makes no difference to anything. If predestination is true, all your actions are futile.
Pelagius bitterly opposed Augustine, but failed to win the debate. While he put free will and rationality on one side of the scales, Augustine put predestination and grace on the other. The scales tipped Augustine's way.
Pelagius's view of grace was that it was something conferred on us to help us to maximise our own potential. Augustine's view was that grace replaced our own free will and allowed us to do what God wanted. He famously said, "The good that I would, I do not; the evil that I would not, that I do." His position is that freely choosing between alternatives is one thing, but having the power to act on what you choose is quite another i.e. we do not possess the power to do what we will (or to be more exact when it comes to doing good we will ourselves not have the power because we are fundamentally wicked). You cannot do genuinely good things unless God gives you the power through his gift of grace.
For Pelagius, grace assists our actions while for Augustine it controls our actions. For Pelagius, our task is more difficult without grace, for Augustine it is impossible.
Where Pelagius emphasized personal effort and moral responsibility, Augustine emphasised grace - the ultimate magic. We might call it aetherial "God dust" (as opposed to gold dust) that he sprinkles on some of us.
It's simply astounding that Christians, and Protestants in particular, reduce human beings to automata, whose fate was decided at conception before they had even done a single thing. Is that what we call "justice"? Is that a meritocracy? Or is it the supreme tyranny, the ultimate enslavement? It beggars belief that any thinking person could be a Christian.
It would have been a different story if Pelagius had proved triumphant. He didn't consider that Jesus Christ died to atone for Original Sin but rather that Jesus' noble self-sacrifice gave God the opportunity to bestow grace on us and hence make it easier for humanity to get to heaven. Jesus, in Pelagius's view, served as a wondrous example to the rest of us, showing that it's possible to lead a sinless life. It was claimed by Pelagius's enemies that he said, in common with some of his supporters, that it was possible for humans to be sinless through their own hard efforts. He answered that this was a foolish idea, though not heretical (in fact, this "foolish idea" was probably very much his position although he was back peddling to avoid being accused of heresy - to say that a man could be sinless was practically saying that a man could be Christ himself). He emphasized that we were made in God's image. Although the image may have become clouded, we can choose to respond to God's grace and clean the image. Augustine on the other hand said that we can never escape from our past. Only God's grace can redeem us.
Many of Pelagius's ideas came close to the Gnostic position that human beings can perfect themselves through their own efforts alone. To take that position too far leads, Pelagius eventually realised, to an attack on the need for Jesus Christ, hence he rowed back. He should in fact have gone further and become an outright Gnostic. Even so, his form of Christianity is one that could be turned into something healthy since it would bear a close resemblance to Gnosticism.
Pelagius is consistently a kind, compassionate man, and Augustine consistently a monstrous sadist. We shouldn't be at all surprised that it was Augustine who won the debate within the Church. So it goes.
Protestantism and Capitalism
Medieval Catholicism was, historically, the greatest enemy of the Illuminati, yet the Illuminati now regard Catholicism as the lesser Christian evil: Protestantism has managed to be much worse, and that takes quite some doing!
It's hard to say exactly which religion is more evil between Islam, Orthodox Judaism and Protestantism. The last can certainly argue a powerful case to be regarded as the ultimate Satanic religion.
Protestantism, at root, regards humanity as fundamentally depraved and evil. It also believes that God has chosen to pluck some lucky ones from the legions of the damned. These are the so-called "elect"; the "saved" - the Church Invisible.
The ordinary Protestant is obviously keen to establish whether he belongs to the Elite of those predestined for salvation. How would he go about discovering this priceless information? It occurred to the Protestant mind that people leading shit lives were likely to be the damned, and those leading worthy lives the saved. After all, it would be perverse to get things the other way around, and the Protestant God isn't perverse (as far as Protestants are concerned!).
The Protestants alighted on money as a direct measure of holiness. Rich people are going to heaven and the poor to hell, they decided. So Protestants became obsessed with hard work - the famous Protestant (Puritan) work ethic - and thrift. (So extreme was the Puritan dedication to work that the Puritan leader Cromwell actually banned Christmas in England during his rule in the 17th century and made people work that day. Whereas Catholic countries offered many days off to celebrate various feast days of the saints, Protestant countries abolished all of these and became obsessed with work to a pathological degree.) Moreover, they had no compunction about ripping off and exploiting the poor. After all, the poor were all hell-fodder, destined for the Devil's fires. Above all, Protestants loved having African slaves because they didn't have to pay them anything at all and they could work them to death and no one would care.
The Protestant elite became rich on the backs of the slaves and the poor. The Old World Order are overwhelmingly Protestant. Unrestrained capitalism is a Protestant ideology. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both Protestants, gave rise to the current era of super wealth for a tiny handful.
Wall Street is an alliance between Protestant Freemasonic capitalists and Jewish worshippers of Mammon. (The Jews, as the world's bankers, eagerly embraced Protestant capitalism.)
Protestants are self-righteous, smug psychopaths. They think conspicuous wealth proves that God is on your side. They think you deserve to go to hell if you have the wrong skin colour or are poor. You can see the evils of Protestantism embedded in America to this day.
Who are the Tea Party? Protestants! Who are Republicans? Protestants! Who are the Old World Order? Protestants! Who are the Freemasons? Protestants! Who live in the racist Confederate States of America? Protestants! Who hated the immigrants from Catholic Ireland, Catholic Italy and Catholic Poland? Protestants! Who hate Catholic Hispanics? Protestants!
Protestantism is all about hate, discrimination, slavery, racism, exploitation, greed, selfishness, and the creed of the Protestant family above all other families.
Protestants are opposed to meritocracy. Look at Protestant England with its ludicrous monarch. Protestants are all about privilege, networking, keeping undesirables out.
Despite their fabulous wealth, look at how hard the Kennedys found it to break into the magic circle in America. The WASPs - the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants - regarded them as filthy Papists. JFK remains the sole Catholic President in American history. (The UK has never had a Catholic prime minister. Tony Blair converted to the Catholic faith after he left office: he feared the electoral consequences of becoming a Catholic in office. It is illegal for the monarch of the UK to be a Catholic, or for the monarch to marry a Catholic - such is the entrenched WASP nature of the UK.)
And who are the people who insist that the first black President isn't even American? The good old Protestants again.
"Reason is the Devil's whore," say Protestants. We say that Protestants are the Devil's dogs.
The people from whom we receive the most hate mail are Protestant "Truthers", Protestant anarcho-capitalists and Protestant libertarians. Most conspiracy theorists are Protestants. All of the anti New World Order propaganda comes from Protestants. Protestants, from the outset, condemned the Illuminati because they thought it was a Catholic secret society, based in Catholic Bavaria and full of Jesuits.
Read all the ridiculous crap about the Illuminati on the internet and you will discover that nearly all of it stems from core Protestant beliefs about evil Catholics. America has historically been a WASP nation and now the WASPs are getting extremely worried that they are losing their grip. Many conspiracy theories are a pathetic plea to return to the American values of a century ago when the WASPs were totally in charge. The Tea Party is a WASP nostalgia movement.
The world will not change until the monstrous religion of Protestantism falls.
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