Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World - Hardcover

Boyce, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1619024985 ISBN 13: 9781619024984

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2015

Synopsis

"Original sin is the Western world's creation story."

According to the Christian doctrine of original sin, humans are born inherently bad, and only through God's grace can they achieve salvation. In this captivating and controversial book, acclaimed historian James Boyce explores how this centuries-old concept has shaped the Western view of human nature right up to the present. Boyce traces a history of original sin from Adam and Eve, St. Augustine, and Martin Luther to Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, and Richard Dawkins, and explores how each has contributed to shaping our conception of original sin.

Boyce argues that despite the marked decline in church attendance in recent years, religious ideas of morality still very much underpin our modern secular society, regardless of our often being unaware of their origins. If today the specific doctrine has all but disappeared (even from churches), what remains is the distinctive discontent of Western people—the feelings of guilt and inadequacy associated not with doing wrong, but with being wrong. In addition to offering an innovative history of Christianity, Boyce offers new insights in to the creation of the West.

Born Bad is the sweeping story of a controversial idea and the remarkable influence it still wields.

About this title

About the Author

James Boyce is the multiple award-winning author of 1835 and Van Diemen’s Land. He has a PhD from the University of Tasmania, where he is an honorary research associate of the School of Geography and Environmental Studies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

What is wrong with me? This question has haunted the West for fifteen hundred years, but until recently it came with an answer which was called original sin. Western people believed they were born bad’ because they had inherited the sin of the first humans. Their understanding of themselves was shaped, as it has been in almost all cultures, by an overarching story of creation. Adam and Eve is an ancient myth whose origins are lost in the campfires of prehistory, making the Western interpretation of the story a comparatively recent innovation. The West shared the same primal parents as now vanished tribes, Jews, Muslims and Eastern (Orthodox) Christians, but it stood alone in seeing the eating of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden as the original sin not only the first sin of human history, but also one that subsequently became innate to the human condition. Only in this version of creation did a decision to disobey God in Paradise become a sin that was inherited by all.

The articulation of original sin and the making of the Western world were enmeshed. The doctrine, like the West itself, was a product of the tumultuous breakup of the Latin-speaking part of the Roman Empire. It underpinned the distinctive religion formulated by the Catholic Church as a Christian culture was built out of the imperial ruins. The creation story was the spiritual foundation on which the Western world was made, directing how people understood the divine, each other, the natural world and, above all, themselves.

Original sin is not part of the wider Judeo-Christian tradition. For Jews and Eastern Christians, the doctrine’s divorce of sin from morality was incomprehensible. It was not just the modern mind that found it difficult to imagine how Adam’s sin could become everyone’s, or to conceive of a God who would condemn otherwise innocent people to hell because of it. In no other religion were people understood to be born bad; in no other were they conceived with a permanently corrupted nature that faced the wrath and judgment of God. The deity of the West is unique in judging people before they commit a moral act. Those who first fought against the doctrine, in the fifth century, argued that a newborn baby could not be regarded as a sinner. They lost the debate.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1619024985
• ISBN 13: 9781619024984
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208