How would you like it if one day, two police officers knocked on your door and told you that you're going to
spend the next 30 years in a maximum security prison with vicious violent rapists and murderers?

 "But I didn't do anything wrong!" you protest.

 "Yes, we're aware of that," says one of the officers. "You have no criminal record because you've been a model citizen your entire life. However, we've just discovered evidence that eighty years ago your great-grandfather robbed a bank and killed a bank teller during the robbery. You have inherited the sin of his crime so now you must pay for it in much the same way that you've inherited the sin of Adam and Eve. We're just following God's example of proper punishment."

I'm surprised that I have to provide an explanation for why the idea of inherited sin is wrong, bad, immoral, unfair, and irrational. It's like having to explain why stabbing random strangers in a grocery store is immoral. It's so commonsensical to me that I have a hard time believing that it's not commonsensical to others. For the sake of argument, I will assume that the God of the Christian Bible exists. Of course he doesn't, but even if he did, the idea of inherited sin would still be wrong.

According to Christianity, the reason we don't currently live in eternal paradise in the Garden of Eden is because of "Original Sin", also known as "Inherited Sin". Adam and Eve ate a forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge at the coaxing of Satan incarnate and this made God so mad that he decided to kick them out of the Garden forever, along with all their descendants.

Why did God even bother planting that tree in Eden if he didn't want Adam and Eve eating from it? What, just to test them? Why bother testing someone if you're omniscient and you already know the outcome of all tests? The purpose of a test is to find out something you didn't know before. If you know what the outcome of the test will be, the test is pointless.

Obviously Adam and Eve fail the test because their free will wasn't up to par. So what does God do? Instead of blaming himself for doing a piss-poor job of designing the human mind, God has a temper tantrum and evicts Adam and Eve from the Garden forever. Yeah, that makes perfect sense: "Let me create a living being and when this being malfunctions, I'll punish it." Any idiot with half a brain would blame himself for the screw-up, but not God. Apparently God's ego is so huge that he can't imagine himself screwing up. Talk about having a God complex! He's the apotheosis of conceit and narcissism.

So after all that is over with, for some mysterious reason God decides to punish Adam and Eve's relatives as well. Apparently, sin can be inherited, like hair and skin color. The definition of sin in the religious sense is "the deliberate disobedience to the known will of God." How can disobedience be inherited? Disobedience is not a genetically-encoded attribute, it's an action or lack of action. How can this possibly be inherited? It can't. Yet everyone on Earth is still punished for Adam and Eve's disobedience, but why should we be punished for something our distant relatives did? How is it any different from throwing you in prison because your great-grandpa was a criminal?

The purpose of punishment is two fold: First, it's to provide negative reinforcement so as to discourage the offender from repeating the offense. Second, it's to serve as an example to others so they can learn from the offender's mistake and hopefully refrain from repeating it. Neither of those applies to the punishment of inherited sin. What offense have new-born infants committed? None. Despite their innocence, they are still punished by this "original sin" nonsense.  Did they ever disobey God? No. Did they eat any forbidden fruits? No. Yet, they are still punished.

Any rational person would think it lunacy to punish the children of a criminal for his crimes. But God is infinitely more insane and unjust because he punishes not just the children, but everyone on the planet, in perpetuity. Billions of people are punished with a lifetime of work followed by death. Why? Because a talking snake convinced a woman to eat a bad fruit. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

The Mafia and other criminal organizations sometimes punish the relatives of transgressors, but these are immoral people who commit crimes. No civilized society or culture on earth punishes innocent people for the crimes of their ancestors because everyone's common sense protests against it. Such a punishment would be irrational, immoral, unfair, and just down-right stupid, yet God sees nothing wrong with it.  What more evidence do we need that the Christian God is a work of fiction invented by primitive unenlightened people who were neither wise nor moral?

{go back to Controversial Topics}