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One of the many tenets of Christianity that I strongly object to is the notion of Original Sin.  Adam and Eve transgressed against the wishes of God, thus we (their descendants) are in need of saving, hence our reliance on Jesus and his crucifixion.  It depends on the premise that responsibility and blame for evil acts are passed down from parent to child.  For this post I will not focus on why such an idea is psychologically harmful (especially to children), although that would be a valid avenue of criticism. Instead, I think it would be more effective to just show why it is wrong.

Imagine that a man rapes and impregnates a woman.  The rapist then escapes the authorities while the woman is left with child. Over the nine month gestation, the police hunt the rapist to no avail.  As the mother gives birth to a son, the police get a lead on the infant’s biological father.  Three weeks later the police raid the rapist’s hideout only to find that he had committed suicide via drug overdose mere hours before they arrived.  At the scene they find a note where the rapist describes his life of murder, crime, and hedonism. Further, he wrote that after having committed all these atrocities, there were no more thrills left for him.  And so he decided he best end his life pleasantly, lest someone else do it for him in a much less favorable manner.

What we have here is someone who has done many evil things, done nothing to make up for his misdeeds, and has escaped all punishment.  He leaves behind two victims who are denied all forms of restitution, justice, and closure.  This is, of course, one of the worst kinds of situations and I don’t pretend to know a good way to deal with it.  But one way I know to be wrong would be to apply the principle of original sin.

If responsibility and blame are indeed passed from parent to child, then we need only go to the infant son to extract justice. If the sins of the father are the sins of the son, then the three week old baby is accountable for his mother’s rape. If original sin held true, the righteous thing to do would be to punish the newborn just as we would punish the rapist had he been caught.

If you agree with me that the previous paragraph’s conclusions are not only absurd, but monstrously unjust and immoral, then the same must be said of the Christian notion of original sin.  No fair and just adjudicator would ever hold someone responsible for something that they did not do, let alone for something that happened before they came into existence. But that is what Christianity says that their god does. (a great reason to start indoctrinating your children early  – ed. )

Here is another quick thought experiment. Think of the worst thing you have ever done in your life. Then categorize that misdeed with a word or short phrase like ‘neglect’ or ‘assault’, or ‘theft’, or ‘betrayal’.  Now, would a just punishment for your category of transgression involve crucifixion?  Do you think it would require someone to have their hands and feet nailed to planks of wood and then slowly, agonizingly asphyxiate  to make up for any of the offences I just mentioned?  Absolutely not.  The fact is that no one human has ever done anything that deserved anything close to that kind of torture.  Even if you believe that the absolute worst of history’s monsters deserve  brutal punishment, those rare instances compose a negligible percentage of the population. The point being that humans, as a whole, are not evil beings and we certainly don’t deserve crucifixion or any other torturous punishment by default.  But Christianity says that we are and that we do.

Of course, it has to. If we were not responsible for evil deeds done before our existence and we did not deserve a cruel fate, then we would have no need of a savior, no need for a messiah, and no need of Jesus or Christianity. If we are on the whole morally higher than rapists and child molestors (empirical evidence says we are), and if we are answerable only to our own deeds (reason and justice say we are) then the  idea of original sin is aboration of truth, a mockery of rationality, and an assault on morality.