Original Sin?

Quote: Evenbob

It's the wording they use, identical
to yours. Like you all have a set
of talking points. I always see
things that you have said, almost
word for word.

That's cool and good to know others share my thoughts. I'm curious if you have any examples?

This is a blog post from Fr. Dan Moloney from Boston. I think it gives a clear indication of the reality of Original Sin:

This week, we’ve been focused on how people of different races don’t love each other. Last fall, in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations and the #MeToo movement, we focused on how men don’t treat women with respect. Before that, we were concerned about how we treated immigrants. And so on. It seems that we get outraged by whatever part of fallen humanity the media causes us to focus on right now, until the next news cycle refocuses us on the sin over there. We can always find genuine, real, interpersonal animosity if we look for it, since we can always find the fallenness of humanity if we look for it.

We can hate people who are different from us. And, as the story of Cain and Abel teaches us, we can hate people who are a lot like us. A few years ago, we were focused on how Irish Christians, racially indistinguishable from each other, were killing each other. We were shocked about how Rwandan Catholics, all of whom are black, conducted a genocide against each other in the 1990s. This Wednesday, we celebrated the feast of Charles Lwanga and the Ugandan martyrs, all members of the Gandan people, who were killed by their own king for refusing his homosexual advances. Husbands and wives, who profess their lifelong love on the day of their weddings, come to hate each other in the wake of the divorce. Mothers kill their own children by the millions through abortion, from some misguided sense of self-preservation (a species of self-love). We can grow to hate or mistrust anyone who isn’t us. That’s the lesson of original sin.

Charity, the greatest gift of the Holy Spirit, is the love that overcomes our anger at injustice and the sinful divisions that follow. Without charity, without grace, our concerns shrink: from a love of all mankind, to a love of our tribe (literal or metaphorical), to a love only of those like us, to a love of this family member but not that one, to a love of ourselves above all, even above Christ. Charity is the love that tears down the walls that divide us. Charity is the readiness to give our lives for those we love, in imitation of Christ’s sacrifice.

As the sad examples of Northern Ireland and Rwanda make clear, Catholics are not free of the temptation to selfishness and even to murder. The Church has had and will always have sinners within it. And yet, in the Creed we say, “we believe in one holy… Church.” This is a dogma. It doesn’t mean that the Church includes only those who are without sin, but rather that the Church is holy insofar as we allow the Holy Trinity to work within us. Through the Holy Spirit, we are baptized into Christ Jesus and his covenant with the Father. When we genuinely act and pray in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we are holy. Charity is a participation in the interior life of the Trinity.

In my book Mercy, I talk about how a great part of the difference between Christian thinking and secular thinking about politics comes down to mercy, to how we respond to injustices. The mistake of what I call “justice-only politics” is to have well-developed ideas about how things ought to be (aka justice), but no concept of mercy, no real thought about what to do when circumstances and/or people get in the way of their idea of justice.

I think the national reaction to the killing of George Floyd reveals something like this. Some people think that the right thing to do is to enact reforms of the police; others think that the right thing to do is to kill the police and bomb the precinct. Some people think that nonviolent protests are an appropriate response; others think that injustice justifies robbing the local Target. Some people are satisfied when the bad cops are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted; others want to overthrow the government. Some are just so upset that they don’t know what to do. All agree that something deeply wrong happened to George Floyd, but our consensus stops there, at the level of justice.

Mercy is the virtue that comes into play when things go wrong. Once we decide that something is unjust, we still have to decide what is the right thing to do. Do we “cancel” the unjust persons, breaking solidarity with them and removing them from society? Do we send them to the guillotine? Or do we try to make things better? In an interesting Trinitarian statement, Jesus commands his disciples to “be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). So justice-only politics, or any politics without solidarity for the offender and the sinner, is not a Christian option.

Quote: FrGamble

This is a blog post from Fr. Dan Moloney

This reminds me of so many sermons
I've heard. Rambling dialog, he goes
here and goes there, thinks he's
making a point and never gets there.
But it's a good example of how unclear
Xtianity is in it's message. This piece
just wanders around looking
for a reason for being written and
makes you feel like you're walking
thru thick mud as the author thrashes
around aimlessly. It's the kind of
thing people hear on Sunday in church,
and say 'Good sermon' to the pastor
when they leave, and they have no real
idea what they just heard.

FrG thinks it's brilliant because it
accomplishes the aim of all sermons, to
go on and on never really say anything.
It's the smoke and mirrors that
bamboozles the people in the pews.

Like most things it is in the eye of the beholder. As Jesus likes to say, "for those with ears to hear..."

Quote: FrGamble

Like most things it is in the eye of the beholder.

The difference between us is, you
were well trained on how to present
gobbly-gook nonsense and make
people believe you're actually
saying something of value.

Alan Watts was the chaplain at
at the U of Chicago in the 40's.
One of the reasons he quit
the religion entirely was the
nonsense sermons he had to
come up with every Sunday. He
realized after a couple years that
they all had the same message.
Try not to sin, try and do good,
and that was about it.

It was his job to come up with
a long winded version on this
every week and he realized how
thin a message Xtianity had. He
had been bamboozled himself
by all the smoke and mirrors and
got out. He studied Eastern religion
and became an authority on it.

I read the sermon you posted twice
and that's what I got out of it.
It all boils down to try and do
what Jesus wants, and try not
to do bad things. He just uses
a ton of unneeded words to get
there.

A really good article on how Jesus
never preached about being tormented
in hell forever. He was a Jew, why
would he have. Jews don't believe
in an afterlife. The article is very
recent by Bart Ehrman.

"Jesus stood in a very long line of serious thinkers who have refused to believe that a good God would torture his creatures for eternity. The idea of eternal hell was very much a late comer on the Christian scene, developed decades after Jesus’ death and honed to a fine pitch in the preaching of fire and brimstone that later followers sometimes attributed to Jesus himself. But the torments of hell were not preached by either Jesus or his original Jewish followers; they emerged among later gentile converts who did not hold to the Jewish notion of a future resurrection of the dead." https://time.com/5822598/jesus-really-said-heaven-hell/

Remove eternal reward and
eternal punishment from
Xtianity and the incentive to
convert is gone. Scare people
with stories of fire and brimstone
and they line up to be 'saved'.

"There are over two billion Christians in the world, the vast majority of whom believe in heaven and hell. You die and your soul goes either to everlasting bliss or torment (or purgatory en route)...The vast majority of these people naturally assume this is what Jesus himself taught. But that is not true. Neither Jesus, nor the Hebrew Bible he interpreted, endorsed the view that departed souls go to paradise or everlasting pain." https://time.com/5822598/jesus-really-said-heaven-hell/

Xtians were sold a bill of goods.
A bunch of made up things
presented as facts that Jesus
taught, when it wasn't true
at all. Jesus was very much a
Jew, first and foremost. He
toed the Jewish line, he had
great respect for Jewish
scripture. And Jews of his
time absolutely believed your
soul died with your body,
there was no afterlife. For
instance, Jesus never ever ever
would have said to the thief
on the cross next to him that
they would be in heaven that
day. No Jew believed that,
especially Jesus. It was made
up in the myth long after he
dies.

You should really read the Gospels. Also Jews do believe in an afterlife when the Messiah comes. Take a look at the belief of Shoel.

Quote: FrGamble

You should really read the Gospels. Also Jews do believe in an afterlife when the Messiah comes. Take a look at the belief of Shoel.

Yes yes, we've discussed Shoel
at length here. The Jews do
not believe the messiah has
come, according to what they
believe the messiah is. He hadn't
come in Jesus time, so Jesus
would never have preached
a reward and punishment
afterlife.

Like Ehrman said, that was
added much later and honed
to a sharp point.

"Without this belief (heavenly reward and eternal punishment), Christianity, would have disappeared, like the movements following other charismatic Jewish figures of the 1st century." Schwartz, Daniel R. (1992), Studies in the Jewish Background of Christianity,

Heaven and hell were added later
as the 'hook' to get people converted.
It's still heavily used today, preaching
fire and brimstone has never
disappeared. Probably one of the
best and most persuasive selling
points ever invented to sell a product.
Totally false and unethical, it was
used like a sharp sword to convert
the uneducated.

So you know about Shoel and just forgot, no problem. Remember Jesus is the Messiah for Christians and if you read the Gospels you can see what He taught about Heaven and Hell.