The doctrine of sin and its relevance today

Why the Christian doctrine of sin fails

The Christian doctrine of sin has no objective basis and serves only to enslave believers, create false guilt and unhappiness and a sense of unworthiness, and make the true believer dependent on the Church for their forgiveness and reconciliation to God. The Church became the mediator of God’s grace through sacraments, such as repentance and reconciliation, aka forgiveness of sins. This applies regardless of denomination. The death and sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of the world is the basis of the blood magic doctrine created from whole cloth by the Apostle Paul, a fraudulent Jewish rabbi of the 1st Century CE. He developed it from Greco Roman ideas and from an obsession with his own sinfulness and sense of unworthiness, probably related to sexual sins with which Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, struggled with his whole life.

The origins of the doctrine of original sin

In Galatians Chapter 1 Paul makes the following extraordinary statements. I quote them in full.

“I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus”.

Paul makes the extraordinary claim that he received his gospel directly from Jesus, who was crucified about a decade before or slightly less. Jesus, presumably no longer dead, met with Paul in the flesh or some ecstatic vision, and taught him the gospel, which Paul then proceeded to go out and preach. Paul offers no evidence, or cites any witnesses to this extraordinary event and uses this claim to denigrate the original disciples, now apostles in Jerusalem, as being inferior to him. Paul’s ego and arrogance knew no bounds, yet he is never challenged by theologians. Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew who never quotes the Hebrew Bible, always referring to the Greek translation of it instead, yet makes the extraordinary claim that he was “zealous for the traditions of my fathers”, yet knew not a word of Hebrew. Paul was possibly a rabbi, but not from Jerusalem, but from the very Greek world of Tarsus, in modern day Turkey. His credentials are very questionable, and I will show in a later essay how he misuses the Hebrew scriptures to create false doctrines that affect the Church up to this time.

Central to Paul’s understanding of sin is the myth of the first human couple, Adam and Eve. Their disobedience led to sin entering the world. In Romans 5 we read:

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned - To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.

Paul literally believed that Adam existed and that Adam sinned against God through disobedience. This story comes from Genesis Chapter 3, and the sin of Adam is again highlighted in the pseudo-Pauline epistle 1 Timothy 2:13-14. This misogynist passage blames Eve for being a weak vessel who was deceived but that Adam chose to disobey. The problem with treating Adam and Eve as literally true beings is that the human race is demonstrably many millennia old, approximately 250,000 years old for Homo Sapiens and up to 400,00 years or more for Homo Neanderthalensis and Heidelbergensis. This account in Genesis Chapter 3 wasn’t written as history, but as part of an aetiological myth. An aetiological myth is a myth written to explain why the world is as it is. In this case, farmers are told that man, in the form of God’s first creation, caused agriculture to be difficult, so bread is earned from the sweat of the brow. It explained why childbirth is so difficult and women die or suffer through it, yet still sexually desire their husbands nonetheless.

Why original sin simply doesn’t exist

Given the cultural setting Paul wrote in, it isn’t surprising that he reached a completely wrong conclusion given his worldview. Why does mankind fail and suffer? Because Adam sinned, and in like manner, we also sin and displease God. To Paul this made good sense, except there never was any such exemplar couple created by God who fell from grace. We humans, and those other hominins before us, all evolved from Homo Erectus, starting around 1.5 million years ago. God wasn’t part of the process. Paul created the doctrine of the atonement, based on the necessity of the sacrifices in the Temple for the people of Israel. However, there is no mention of sacrifice of a Messiah for the sins of the world anywhere in the Hebrew Bible or in any Jewish teachings. It is the reason that the Jews reject Christianity, not because they are hard-hearted, but because there is nothing is the Hebrew Bible or their traditions that justify such a belief.

What is sin as we understand it. In Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary, we find:

Sin is a riddle, a mystery, a reality that eludes definition and comprehension. Perhaps we most often think of sin as wrongdoing or transgression of God's law. Sin includes a failure to do what is right. But sin also offends people; it is violence and lovelessness toward other people, and ultimately, rebellion against God. Further, the Bible teaches that sin involves a condition in which the heart is corrupted and inclined toward evil. The concept of sin is complex, and the terminology large and varied.

In fact, for Jews, sin is a failure to follow the Mosaic Laws, of which there are 613. For non-Jews, there is no clear definition. It has nothing to do with crimes committed against the laws of your country. Sin is not objectively measurable. The measure used is God’s perfection, but this same God who traditional theology tells us is morally perfect, holy and just, also condones and even encourages the taking of slaves, genocide of foreign people, and the taking of virgin women as plunder when Israel was invading the “Promised Land”. See Deuteronomy 20:10-18. Knowing this about God reduces any credibility he might have. Sin is a religious construct of Christianity, created to explain how disobeying the laws of God is the cause of human suffering and pain. This doctrine holds billions of people in bondage, Christian and Muslim alike. It creates a belief in personal unworthiness and is the source of jihad by Muslims, seeking Allah’s Paradise and forgiveness through devotion, and extreme Christian Fundamentalism and Christian Nationalism, and in both cases, promotes mental illness.

The carrot and the stick are Heaven and Hell. Faithful followers of Jesus will be rewarded with an eternity in Heaven, in God’s eternal presence, devoted to an eternity of worshipping God. For those who are sinners, there is a place reserved for them called Hell, where they will send eternity burning in torment for their failure to worship God, regardless of whether or not they even heard about God. Sin can only be absolved by blood, according to Paul, and faith in the atoning blood of Jesus is the ultimate antidote to sin which condemns us all. Neither Heaven nor Hell exist in the Hebrew Bible. Everyone, regardless of whether or not they were good or bad, were sent to Sheol, a shadowy place under the Earth, where they existed in a spiritual form, awaiting the final coming of the Messiah. Heaven and Hell are drawn from Greco Roman culture and only exist in the pages of the New Testament, and Paul talks about unbelievers being subject to destruction, eternal punishment. The gospel authors take the idea much further, putting these ideas in the mouth of Jesus. This goes much further than the Hebrew Bible and the teachings of Judaism.

A rarely discussed matter is for whom this myth was written. It dates from the post-exilic period, after Israel returned from the Babylonian Captivity, released by the Persian king Cyrus and later Darius. The entire Adam and Eve myth is an agricultural myth. Adam’s curse isn’t that he will be unsuccessful in the hunt, that Eve will be unable to find and gather food. This myth relates exclusively to the civilisation of the Ancient Near Eat, and has no resonance with hunter/gatherer peoples, who have always been the most resistant to evangelism. This is because they aren’t enculturated to believe in ideas like “sin”. The tribal units were small, they relied on each other for their hunting success and for finding food, and the greed and avarice found in civilisations simply was foreign to them. They live without ideas like sin, and their societies function far better than evangelists and missionaries would have you believe. It is contact with civilisation that pollutes their quality of life and leads to their demise, and that is because of nonsensical Christian beliefs in things like sin and salvation.

The consequences of sin according to the Bible

We should consider the types of sins that can get you tossed into an eternal hellfire for your failings. Matthew 5 tells us:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven”.

Jesus is not offering a get out of gaol-free card. He is demanding complete obedience to the Law of the Jews. Later in Matthew we read:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart”.

So, a thought crime can cause you to sin and be judged as failing to keep the Law. Your autonomic nervous system was triggered by an attractive woman (or man), so you’re going to Hell, despite choosing to put that thought to one side and deciding to be righteous instead. No, you are too late. You lusted. In Matthew 5:22 we read:

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment”.

The demands of Jesus are so extreme that no one, not the most righteous of men or women, would be able to satisfy God’s demands. If Jesus is speaking this way, then no one is able to enter the Kingdom of God. Remember, Matthew was written around 75 – 85 CE, at least forty years after the crucifixion of Jesus and twenty odd years since the death of the Apostle Paul. All are condemned, according to Paul, because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The character of God, as we shall see, is anything but glorious. Sin is an absurd concept. You have to accept that some divine superbeing exists who has the power and authority to make these pronouncements, and then believe they are reasonable and should be followed. For anyone interested, read up on Divine Command Theory and you will see the problems with following the Bible or any “holy” book too closely.

Anger and lust not acted upon are crimes of thought, but inevitable because the thought has arisen before you can do anything to stop it. Being condemned to eternal punishment for such thoughts is utterly crazy. Murder is prohibited by society as part of its normal functioning, as it should be, but being condemned for worshipping the wrong god is again crazy, but according to the Ten Commandments, that’s a sin. YHWH, the God of the Bible, has been more than lazy in making himself known to the human race. Homo Sapiens are around 250,000 years old, but God waited until 2000 BCE to reveal himself to Abraham, the patriarch the Jews claim as having been given the promise of the land, who almost certainly never existed. That’s 250,000 years of humans not knowing who they should be worshipping, but being condemned to an eternal Hell for their ignorance. In Romans 1:18 and following, Paul has a rant and makes it clear that there is no excuse for worshipping the wrong God. It is plain from the existence of the world that YHWH is the correct God. Paul would have been considered a highly intelligent person in his day, as well as being intolerant, but his knowledge of the world, history and science was non-existent. His pronouncements shouldn’t be considered as inspired by God, but his personal and often wrongheaded beliefs. I won’t even try to justify Paul’s belief that we have no excuse.

The same God who is going to send you to Hell for eternity for a thought crime, is perfectly happy with you owning slaves from the surrounding nations, having your children stoned to death for disobedience (Deut. 21:18) or your daughter stoned to death for not being a virgin (Deut. 22:13 and following), and paying 50 shekels for stealing a woman’s virginity by rape (Deut.22:25). More egregious attitudes towards human life and particularly women, can’t be imagined, but this is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This God is worse than the people he is trying to regulate, but whose undivided worship he demands.

The absurdity of the concept of sin

Sin is such a ubiquitous idea that we never stop to question it, but it’s a ridiculous concept. Sin isn’t just antisocial or bad behaviour. It’s not the same as disobeying the laws that your society laid down for proper governance of the country. Sins aren’t crimes. They are disobedience to some laws that were written by priests who claimed they knew the mind of God and were writing his laws for him. In other words, they were fabricating the laws that determined sin or righteousness. In Romans 13 Paul tells believers to obey the law because those in power are there because they were placed in power by God.

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. … They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience”.

This is extremely problematic. This verse almost makes sense in the time in which Paul lived, but even there no right-thinking person could think that God placed a monster like Nero on the throne. Today, with our democracies it makes even less sense. Did God put Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Pinochet or Putin over the people as his chosen ruler? Three of these were guilty of genocide and wholesale murder. Did God choose them? Obviously not. If God placed them in power, it makes a mockery of the belief in God’s goodness and justice. It also begs the question as to how God managed that? Did he influence voters to vote a particular way, thereby violating their free will? Did he approve the Brown Shirts who did the street violence against Jews that ultimately led to Hitler being voted in? Paul had no concept of a world in which the people, the laity, chose their rulers. Through the democratic process, the opportunity exists for the citizens to change their rulers, bring them to account for their failings and even use the legal process to prosecute them. Are modern citizens sinning against God when they make leaders accountable? Only by special pleading could an apologist argue that scripture here is completely irrelevant and therefore, not inerrant. It shows how dubious are the judgements as to what is and isn’t sin.

Genesis and original sin

Genesis Chapter 3 is the source of the story of how mankind, specifically Eve, disobeyed God and brought sin and death into the world. The story is so well known that I won’t include it here. In Chapter 1, God provides an idyllic environment for his new sentient beings, giving them access to everything with one prohibition – the eating of the fruit from a single tree. This prohibition provides the basis for the narrative. Chekhov, the playwright, once said that if you write a gun into the script, the gun has to be used. The writer of Genesis, some 2200 – 2500 years ago, understood this storytelling device. The writer then provides a protagonist in the form of a talking serpent (who isn’t Satan, which is a New Testament innovation). Eve gets the message wrong. A close reading of the chapter doesn’t make it clear if Eve had yet been made from Adam’s rib, so maybe she didn’t hear the message herself, but she got it wrong.

Communications between men and women has always been fraught. I’m voting for Adam not telling Eve in clear and definite terms. Perhaps he was stunned to have such a perfect partner made for him by God. Whatever the reason, the message wasn’t passed on. She becomes the weak link, and the serpent takes advantage of her imperfect understanding of God’s instructions. The serpent offers a perfectly good explanation – God doesn’t want you to know the whole truth. Knowledge is power. God wants to keep you ignorant and subservient to him. Of course, the woman likes this message, and “sin” comes through her disobedience. The tale ends with a judgement by God on the descendants of Adam and Eve for all generations, and he passes a curse on the serpent and then the woman, and finally, the man, Adam.

Aetiological mythology

Aetiology is the study of the causes, origins, or reasons behind the way that things are, or the way they function. In this case, the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, whose purpose is to explain the world as it was. This creation myth tries to explain the origins of human suffering, such as pain, death, war, famine and pestilence. In this instance, the Genesis creation myth explains why women suffer in childbirth, lose their babies and sometimes even their own lives. It’s because mankind, through Adam and Eve, sinned against God’s prohibition. This disobedience causes God, their creator and loving Father, to curse Adam, Eve, the snake, and, by extension, his whole creation. It also explains patriarchy, a cruel practice that subordinates women to their husbands or fathers and makes women of lesser value and importance than men. Christian history has been guilty of promoting the idea of women as being of lesser importance than men and it was the suffragettes of the early twentieth century who, in modern times, began the pushback against misogyny and oppression. Feminism continued the fight, which is still far from won, which is for genuine equality in wages, social status and opportunity, and respect. The tyranny of misogyny is alive and well today in the USA and Project 2025, the rolling back of rights, even voting rights if some states get their way.

The consequences for Eve

The myth promises a curse on women, who will suffer in childbirth, and whose desire will be for her husband, as in they will still desire sex, despite the pain. Childbirth has always been hazardous for women, with childbirth deaths reaching as high as forty percent in the eighteenth century, due to unclean hygiene practices by doctors and midwives. Women have always suffered because their pelvic girdle isn’t ideally suited for vaginal delivery and requires the baby’s head to still be malleable enough for it to emerge from the birth canal. The skull later fuses fully, but newborn babies have a fontanelle, allowing the brain to expand later.

This aetiology simply explains what women have known since we evolved as a species, but it explains the cause for the suffering as being sin - disobedience by the woman to God. The passage, “desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” is more concerning. This is religious sanction for patriarchy, which reflected the existing situation for women but gives it God’s seal of approval. In other words, women should be subjected to men, because it’s God’s will. By extension, it makes women of lesser status in God’s divine order. After all, Eve only came into God’s mind because there was nothing in the animal kingdom suitable as a mate for Adam. See Genesis 2:20 for the story of Eve being taken from Adam’s rib. Obviously, we can’t take this literally, because a clone from Adam’s rib would be a male clone, and we know we can’t have Adam and Steve, only Adam and Eve, so there was something else happening here. Voila, a woman is taken out of a man.

The consequences for Adam

For Adam, the failure of the harvest and his hard labour as a farmer is the direct consequence of eating from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The talking snake, that apparently had legs before, but not after, completes his campaign of misinformation in the Garden of Eden, and is cursed with slithering upon the Earth as a punishment for deceiving Eve. This part of the myth explains the natural revulsion most humans would have felt towards snakes, especially venomous snakes that regularly killed farmers like Adam and Eve. Also, the curse on Adam would only apply to farmers, members of an agrarian society, people who ate bread by the sweat of their brow. This prohibition would make no difference to a member of a hunter/gatherer tribe for whom bread is an irrelevance, so the myth dates from after mankind began farming in the Ancient Near East (ANE). This cursing is a myth, not an actual account of an event that took place in real time or in a real geographical location.

How Genesis affects all mankind

In the Garden of Eden narrative, Adam and Eve are set up to fail. God places an obvious temptation in their way. Adam and Eve were created as intelligent and sentient beings, having self-awareness and a personal relationship with God, or at least Adam does. Both lacked any worldly experience and, therefore, they lacked the wisdom that comes with that experience. Wisdom only comes through life experience. Consider your own life and you will realise that’s true. Did Adam and Eve understand the concept of death? Certainly not, because they had never seen another dead human being because they were the first human beings. In the real world, outside the boundaries of this mythical garden, where mankind evolved, death was a daily experience.

This ranged from the animals they hunted and killed, to the members of the tribe who died from old age, women who died in childbirth, tribal members who died from disease or accidents or animal predation. This agrarian myth of the prototype humans only makes sense to a developed civilisation and has no resonance in any other society. Augustine of Hippo tried to argue that God made them perfect, both in wisdom and intelligence, but it should be obvious that this is only an attempt to shoehorn his doctrine of human depravity into the myth. It’s a very depressing dogma which is by no means universally agreed upon as you will see from following the link. The Jewish religion does not see human nature as irrevocably tainted by original sin, which is significant as I will show later. It is a “Christian” construct of Paul’s.

God also lies when he tells Adam; “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”. Verse 18 tells us Eve hadn’t been created yet, so only Adam heard this prohibition according to Genesis Chapter 2. Neither Adam and Eve died as a consequence of eating the forbidden fruit. For Adam, he supposedly died at the age of 930. Apologists try to argue God’s words refers to “spiritual death”, an unknown concept in the Hebrew Bible. The argument is anachronistic.

Why the Adam and Eve narrative fails to convince

Palaeontology is central to disproving the Adam and Eve story as being objectively true. Palaeontology is the study of prehistoric life forms (or fossils) preserved in rocks and ancient sediments and the evolution of life on Earth. It is a multidisciplinary science, involving not only geology but also aspects of biology and chemistry. It includes studies into the origins of the human race as we now know it. Homo Sapiens, you and I, are members of the last hominin species left on Earth, after the other versions of human beings, being Homo Neanderthalensis, Heidelbergensis, Denisova, Erectus, Habilis, Naledi, Floresiensis and others we don’t even yet know existed, finally became extinct. Neanderthals seem to have last lived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. Homo Sapiens as a species date from at least 250,000 years ago. Fossils and stone tool artifacts have been found and dating confirms this extreme age of Homo Sapiens as a species. The human race came out of Africa, were hunter/gatherers for millennia and spread out across Europe and into Asia and Northern Europe, becoming the last hominin species to survive. They wouldn’t develop agriculture until 13,000 years ago.

Modern science is able to date fossils of ancient hominins and humanity is ancient beyond anything any religious book, Jewish, Christian, or any other religion, can imagine. The very age of the human race defeats myths like that of Adam and Eve, and nobody should feel any obligation to believe these ancient myths as anything other than ancient attempts to explain their worlds and the suffering that is the destiny of every person. The misogyny in them is a reflection of ANE societies of the time. These myths must not be believed and followed dogmatically. They were written to explain the world in their times and they are essentially magical thinking. Talking snakes, creation by divine fiat, god or gods giving divine instructions that people fail to follow and placing blame on one part of the human race – females – are all examples of the thinking process of primitive societies limited by their lack of understanding of the natural world. In the twenty-first century a literal belief in the creation myth and the fall of man speaks to the lack of sophistication in the thinking of modern Christians. This story, as I have shown, is an ancient myth that cannot and should not be understood as literally true.

Can this myth be understood as a metaphor for the cause of human behaviour or spiritualised away? I don’t see how, because it is central to the Apostle Paul’s doctrine of sin and death. Unless it is literally true, Paul’s promise of an atoning Messiah becomes irrelevant. The Jewish religion rejects Christian belief on exactly this point – that there is no atoning, dying and resurrecting Messiah in Jewish religion and the Hebrew Bible.

Consequences of abandoning the concept of sin

Is abandoning an outdated and religious concept such as sin going to impact negatively on society or the individual? Will it lead to a degradation of moral values and an increase in crime? If you listen to some apologists like William Lane Craig or Jordan Peterson there is no alternative. Peterson is obsessed with the Dostoyevsky novel “Crime and Punishment” and is convinced that atheists, if they existed, would all be wanton murderers, unable to resist their worst impulses. It’s an absurd notion, but, then, Peterson is absurd. China, Russia and every other non-Christian country seems to function quite well without Christianity and without resorting to mass murder every other day. The world would not be doomed by abandoning sin as a concept. It would be replaced with societal laws and moral and ethical precepts, without an “absolute transcendent ruler” who is unprovable and with whom you can’t converse. Would it really be the end of the world as we know it? Christians are good at catastrophising events that they believe disagree with or deny God. Do their beliefs have any basis in fact? No.

Living as a Christian and being constantly aware of sin and sinfulness is impossible. No one can be that self-aware without being paralysed into inaction at every step of life. The result is that Christians lie to themselves and give themselves a pass for “minor” sins, like telling small white lies to protect a person’s feelings, or keeping up a fiction for children like Santa Claus or driving a few kilometres an hour over the speed limit. They give themselves a pass because their “sins” aren’t major, like cheating on their taxation or being a serial killer, and society can only continue if we all engage in some fictions like that. All Christians compromise themselves and their beliefs every day of their life, but rationalise it because they believe themselves to be decent and honest people. And most are and this is really the only way to be a Christian in the modern world.

We all know someone who is the utterly committed Fundamentalist Christian who refuses to compromise on anything, who are absurdly concerned with everything that they think is essential to living righteously, which is the demand made in Revelation Chapter 3 of the Laodicea, that they must be hot or cold but never lukewarm. It could be argued that these Fundamentalists who refuse to compromise for a peaceful life are the only true Christians and everyone else are lukewarm and therefore rejected by God. I would also add that they follow a lifestyle that is both unsustainable without joining a cult of like-minded people and they are socially unpleasant to deal with for everyone not of their mindset.

I argue that most believers discount the meaning of the word “sin” and that it has essentially no meaning in modern conversation. Sin is something that rapists and murderers commit, not good people who fudge their Christian beliefs by occasional and not so occasional sins, like lying, speeding and committing adultery. Rates of infidelity and divorce are the same amongst religious and non-religious populations alike. The Christian Church is declining in most countries, and more so where educational standards are high. Christians are increasingly identifying themselves as non-affiliated with any church in census statistics or as agnostic or atheist. Being locked into a religious belief that defies commonsense like Christianity has lost its appeal. Being a member of a believing community no longer has the same appeal it once did, just as being bound by religious rules like being judged for innocent thought crimes no longer makes sense to people who can think for themselves. Christianity has relied on the sheep in the pews to be uneducated and compliant, but, as Bob Dylan once said, “The times, they are a changing”. Religious dogma can no longer stand the glare of scrutiny from intelligent, educated believers and sceptics in the scientific age without being seen as the fraud it is. The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes and we can all see it.

Conclusion

The implications for Christianity arising from the Adam and Eve narrative are fatal for the religion. The “fall” of mankind and the consequent doctrine of original sin, first preached by Paul and later developed into a full-blown Church dogma by Augustine of Hippo is a central Christian belief. Without it, there is no need for a saviour to redeem sinners from eternal perdition. Nor can the original sin be spiritualised or treated as a metaphor. The sin of Adam must be literal; the sinner is condemned regardless of his or her best intentions because sin is baked into their very DNA, because their parents were sinners who reproduced after their own kind and so on back to the beginning of time. Palaeontology spells the death of belief in this dogma. This doctrine is entirely absent from the Jewish religion and forgiveness in Judaism requires repentance, obedience to the Law and faithful living.

There is no mention of God requiring a human sacrifice to atone for sin anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. God, being Almighty, can simply forgive sinners according to Judaism. The slaughterhouse soteriology of Christianity is absent from Jewish religion and is an anathema to the followers of Jewish religion. The concept of a Messiah coming to die a sacrificial death for the forgiveness of the world is also entirely absent. This is a Pauline concept that is unsupported by Hebrew scriptures and is his sole invention. The Jews are demonised as a hard-hearted people who are resistant to God and reject his Saviour, Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, the Jews rightly reject this distortion of the messianic promises as being a Pauline invention, and they are not rejecting God. They are rejecting Paul and his teaching.

Sin is a false doctrine because it fails any test of objectivity. It is determined by the prophets and priests who wrote scriptures and claimed they were writing the words of God, and their writings must be accepted by faith. Sin is a fluid concept, changing to suit the cultural milieu religions find themselves in. The Bible claims to be divinely inspired, but in the absence of any evidence, the reader is entitled to question this claim. They need to determine for themselves if their actions fail to meet some reasonable moral or ethical standard, not be the slaves to some arbitrary rules found in a holy book.

Sin has been used by Christianity of all colours, and there are over 25,000 denominations, to keep and control members because the Church in all its iterations are the mediators between the sinner and Almighty God. The utter corruption of so many churchmen and the Church’s role in covering up sexual abuse against women and children further erodes any authority the Church may claim. I understand the desire to continue in Christian fellowship because of friendships and the community, but I firmly believe Christianity is a false religion, created by Paul and adopted by the Roman Empire. Only its incredible numerical superiority gives it any appearance of credibility. This is the fallacy of the majority and is a bad reason to remain in. Christians should abandon the idea of sin, follow the Jewish model of repentance and choosing to live right, and stop being a slave to sin as an idea. They would be liberated and rejoice in their freedom.

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Faith, Evidence, Liberation