Original sin

And one day, I started thinking about my own childhood.

I went to Catholic school, and one of the earliest things I remember learning about my relationship with God was the idea of original sin.

If you're not familiar with it, original sin is the teaching that humanity inherited a fallen condition from Adam and Eve's disobedience in the Garden of Eden.

And centuries later, St. Augustine even connected the transmission of original sin to sexual desire and the very act through which our parents conceived us.

think about that.

The very sexual act that brings us into the world became associated with passing down a condition of sin.

A 2014 letter from former Pope Benedict XVI has been making the rounds online.

He answers some questions about Adam and Eve, original sin, and intelligent aliens.

But what he says is going to make some folks angry.

So, is the letter real and what does he say? Let's get into it.

and that was

reasonable

because the italian mail system has a reputation for mishaps the vatican post office has a reputation for being much better and the diplomatic couriers are better yet unfortunately professor musso does not reproduce the text of his letter in the book and i really wish he had so that we could clearly see both sides of the conversation however from benedict's reply we can tell that professor musso asked him four questions and from how benedict answers we can tell something about what the questions were also in the textbook professor musso summarizes them he says my first question was whether the origin of humanity from a single couple as the bible narrates it should be taken literally the thesis of monogenism or not the thesis of polygynism i'll explain more about this in a bit but for now we can say that the first question dealt with polygynism musso continues my second question went straight for the big target namely nothing less than the correct interpretation of the nature of original sin so the second question was about original sin these first two questions were thus about human origins rather than directly about extraterrestrial life but that's going to change with the third question unfortunately we have a bit of a difficulty here because in his reply benedict combined his answers to the third and fourth questions that means that they were closely related but it also means that it's at least a little harder to pull them apart Professor Musso also doesn't clearly distinguish them in his textbook.

Instead, he says, Finally, here is the question most eagerly awaited, whether the existence of other intelligent species in the universe is admissible for the Christian faith.

And that's

Okay, so now they're talking about original sin.

Over here we got, and when you talk to people, it goes with their fitrah, their innate nature.

Over here we got original goodness.

that.

So I want everybody to understand.

Here, what makes more sense? Original goodness or original sin? Now he's like, oh, this guest here, he says it's confusing, debates and whatnot, but...

Let's talk about that concept in Islam.

The activity of knowing and taking responsibility for one's self and one's actions is an important part of being a person in the sense specified by characterizations we encounter in both Aristotelian hylomorphic and Kantian critical philosophy.

Insofar as Kantian critical philosophy is concerned we recognize the presence of Pelagianism which in spite of originating in the context of an ecclesiastical framework, was in fact a thorn in the side of church theology for a considerable period of time, being subjected to condemnation by Saint Augustine who argued for the thesis of original sin requiring forgiveness by the grace of God.

Kant's thesis of radical evil in his work Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason is based not on a metaphysical concept of human inheritance of a fault of earlier members of the species, but rather on the maxims of an agent making free choices in a context where striving for the good occurs freely and naturally in an environment in which it is expected.

Those who choose self-interest over moral duty are corrupt in the sense of not fulfilling the human rational potential of members of the species of human such.

And as a result, she ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and sin entered the world.

And so every human since then has what we call original sin.

We have its...

One of my favorite Puritans, Thomas Watson, he talks about this, like you take a cup of water and the water is totally clean and you take a dropper and you drop one drop of poison in it.

And so I don't know if you, is there a way to cut this section out of when you do this broadcast?

You believe that you created your own bad heart? You did it yourself? Or was it done to you?

It's born into us from the original sin, from the seed of Adam, that it's not my mom's fault.

It is passed down from Adam and Eve.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at ThomisticInstitute.org.

So my topic tonight is original sin.

To open this retreat on justification, the topic we'll be discussing, reflecting on, and praying about over the next couple of days, I thought that a suitable way to begin would be to address why human beings need justification to begin with.

The answer in one word is sin, in two words is original sin.

The goal of this first opening talk is to explain what that means and why it's so important to the Christian understanding of a human being.

Why sinfulness is so much part of who we are.

to the beginning point, I said to begin with that justification is to be cleansed of one's sins.

The presupposition of that definition is that human beings are sinful, that there is something of which they need to be cleansed.