Sins vs. Sin

This little essay was originally left as a comment on the Triablogue blog.

Daniel Morgan appealed to "social structures" and "social environment" as distinct from individual actions. This is illogical, since on his view social systems are comprised of individual units that have no choices, as Paul pointed out. Continuing in Daniel's view they only "enforce rules" by tending toward their statistical norms without any concious agent. (This applies in all areas of conciousness, not just morality.)

Daniel is also lazy if he wants to bring Biblical argument (from the outside, I note), since he hasn't (to my knowledge) even tried to invoke Ezekiel 18:1-4. This passage talks about individuals not being held accountable for the sins committed by another individual, in particular, their ancestors.

But original sin is not "sins," (the latter is what is spoken of in the passage from Ezekiel), it's the inherited guilt for the sin of Adam, who was acting as our federal head (representative). Daniel is, as the hosts here have repeatedly pointed out, getting caught in a category error, probably based on the use of the English words "sin" vis-a-vis "sins".

Watching Daniel's miscategorization is like older electrical engineers thinking complex software is easy because the first syllable is "soft".

Analogy for original sin and individual sins: I walk into a dark room. I don't know what color the walls are. Someone turns on a dim light, and I see the walls are green. The light brightens and I see the walls are dark green. The light goes higher, and (if I've spent enough time in a paint store) I can tell it's Sherwin Williams Billiard Green. The light goes higher, a spectrometer is brought in, and the Billiard Green is analyzed down to its components. This is the way original sin operates. The wall was green from the time I entered the room; I was "conceived in sin" (as Daniel quoted from Psalm 51). As the light was turned on, I could tell what the color was; my original sin was "reflected" in my actions. The light got brighter, and the green-ness didn't diminish, but increased in specificity; my sins became more and more egregious. The spectrometer is brought in and the colors analyzed; the Bible comes to convict me of my sins and my original sin. I could take the analogy farther, but this is all that's relevant for this discussion.

$Id: OriginalSin.html 409 2006-09-15 03:07:00Z criglerj $