I´ve liked Matt Fox a lot, and originally ate up, in my own terms, his title of "Original Blessing." Yet, the doctrinal tit-for-tat, and the needs of reality, and the teachings of Jesus, have implications that make Blessings and Sin important contexts. If the Creation was considered "good" in Genesis, Jesus´ legacy in biological evolution and human historical sociology and anthropology gives us plenty of material to chew on about human inclinations and tendencies, psychosocial and biological, to indulge in the abuse of power, privilege, and pleasure.
Here´s a string of my comments in a dialogue....
I´ve enjoyed knowing about Matt Fox for a long time. Now, however, I know how far I´ve come. I got a degree in Bio Anthropology that has served me fundamentally to push through and identify my approach as spiritual empirical theism. Fox is reacting to some doctrinal spectrum, and affirming an important message. However, the issues raised by "original sin" aren´t actually unempirical.
Jesus did talk about "Clean the cup on the inside where there is wickedness", and the Lord´s Prayer includes, "Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil." Those are the operative human quality variables that are empirically observable, in religious institutions or otherwise. It isn´t religious people that had to stretch to invent "Original Sin." YN Harari, whose own assumptions I disagree with in spiritual-religious aspects, nevertheless raises very empirical issues in trying to assess the meaning of agricultural settlement and human rights.
A helpful case study is the late CEO Ray Anderson. The guy had a multinational corporation for floor carpeting in 1994 when a client wrote a letter in the spirit of the 1992 UN Rio Earth Summit on sustainability. His staff forwarded it, and Anderson researched the matter, taking it deadly seriously, at last, you might say (considering the 1972 UN Stockholm environmental conference, Earth Day, Rachel Carson, and more). Anderson came around to say things like, "I have been living as a pirate." FD Roosevelt, moreover, it is worth noting, had applied the Social Gospel to create the New Deal, not a business-influenced free market extension of the Stock Market disaster. America´s corporate business profiteers had even connived with mercenary pro-rich "gospel" ministers in what became linked to US military propaganda.
Original Sin, and original blessing, both have important empirical considerations to be understood and acted upon.
B H T
Author
M R M Original sin has been taught that it is an awful evil that everyone in their very conception are stained with. Which then condemns everyone so conceived to a place of eternal punishment. Of course, there is a proffered remedy. Which is nothing like Jesus taught. But you are right that Jesus more than once called out self-righteous hypocrites who ignored the needs of the poor and oppressed.
M R M
@B H T Good point about the specifics of the original sin doctrine. Yet, even so. Simply treating "original sin" as totally false, or even totally replacing it with "original blessing" is ultimately insufficient. My point goes further. I have a degree in Biological Anthropology, and more, and noted the issue of more than "self-righteous hypocrites." A wide range of people indulge in the abuse of power, privilege, and pleasure, and as with the profiteering businesspeople who connived with the Billy Graham-like Rev Fifield to concoct a pro-rich "gospel", there is a "wickedness" that J referred to as I quoted, I recall. The "deceitfulness of wealth" was another term J himself used.
AN Whitehead had an interesting insight, as he proposed ideas such as the evil of the industrial revolution involving "the diversion of attention to 'things instead of values.'" Whitehead similarly observed, "“The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from (mankind´s) uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.”
More specific angles are like evaluating Christopher Columbus and other cruel Conquistadors of various nations. Merchants and soldiers, even as part of "Christian civilization," weren´t themselves even monastic spiritual practitioners. Yet, violence and enslavement weren´t even just nominal Christians. It has been a typical behavior of all human civilizations. The British African Olaudah Equiano´s African father had slaves before he was enslaved. China´s Hongwe Emperor massacred by execution huge numbers of people. For starters. The famous infamous Genghis Khan led the slaughter of an estimated 40 to 60 mn people before achieving a level of stability as ruler and a reputation of religious "tolerance." Depending on definitions of tolerance, in the end, for that matter.
We even have biological studies of Jane Goodall´s famous line of chimpanzees in East Africa, Pan troglodytes. They are known to slaughter their neighbors entire groups, because they can. Similar studies of human tribal groups showed ample conflict and shifting alliances in temporary lulls. Children have some good qualities, but idealizing them fails in relation to a necessary and sufficient empirical philosophical analysis of truth. If "original sin" needs its own empirical broadening, it isn´t because it doesn´t have its own empirical foundations.
That leads to the next point which is "Original Sin" and "Original Blessing" require empirical observation of current reality, no less. What is current behavior? In my case, mere psychotherapeutic insight into human potential and mental health doesn´t directly translate into eco-social injustice, as with Jesus´ own leading the disciples on the Sabbath. Matt 12. Psychology itself has developed subdisciplines, with Seymour Sarason innovating community psychology and Julian Rapaport innovating the concept of "empowerment" in the 1970s, and I Martin-Baro innovating liberation psychology, some time after liberation theology, no less.
That´s where George Fox´s leading the co-founding of the Quaker-Friends was a powerful revelatory event. Without much formal education as the son of a prosperous merchant, Fox created a spiritual-religious practice of silent waiting meditatively on the Inner Light of Christ for God. Yet the result wasn´t merely being nice. He stopped bowing to aristocrats, valued individuals and women, and protested injustice. He did merely become known as a "co-founder" among sixty others, and yet, their proteges agitated against slavery to inspire the first modern social movement. Understanding the empirical realities of sin, original or not, and its meaning, along with responding effectively to it, certainly go beyond merely asserting an "original blessing", which is certainly insufficient.
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