The Nature of the Original Sin
In 2009, as a nine-year-old child, I was enrolled at the local parish church for catechism classes, with the goal of gaining a rudimentary understanding of the pillars of Catholicism. For the ensuing year, I devotedly read the Bible and tried to learn as much as a nine-year-old was capable of, or at least what my attention span allowed me. It was a beautiful experience. I had always admired the people who got the holy communion and so with the goal in sight, the catechism classes were light work. I, in fact, put in extra time to read and understand the Bible, as it was going to be the basis to judge my qualifications to join the line for holy communion. It also should not come off as strange that one of my first scares of death as a five-year-old was because I ate the holy communion while I was unqualified, by catholic standards. I was summoned to the office of the headmistress of my then nursery school and was told that I would die later in the day, so I was advised to pray to God so that he would forgive me and welcome my soul into heaven. Essentially, I was really just imitating my elders and now I was faced with the possibility of death at five years of age. I still don’t know why that nun felt like that was an appropriate strategy to scare a child. I had no idea what death was or how it felt like, but I had a feeling that it was a really dreadful thing. I had seen my grandmother cry after one of our neighbors died.
My grandmother was then the headteacher of the local girl’s school that was under the jurisdiction of the church. She saw that her reputation would perhaps take a beating among her priest and nun friends if her grand kids were not attending catechism classes at the earliest possible time. It was a blissful time. I loved every bit of it. It was actually during this period that the young catechumen would crush on a girl for the first time. In truth, I was a child. I didn’t even know what love was in the sense of a boy-girl relationship or what people in love did, so when I say I fell in love as a nine-year-old boy, what I really mean is that there was a girl I found aesthetically pleasing, shared some of my snacks with her and we held hands after classes. I would wait for her every time classes were done, or if I sat close to her in class, all I wanted was for her to recognize my presence, and that would be enough. It was a time of pure innocence mixed with optimism and ignorance about the future.
Such is the bliss of childhood. There are events that happen once in childhood and then we continue to hold them in the deepest parts of memory, in the same manner that religious groups and cults cherish the relics of their saints. In most cases, it is usually a very profound moment of love from someone that one loves. For my part, I have quite a few but one that stands out was during the period of the catechism classes when I took the first readings in church. It was from St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Grandmother was in attendance, and I was not about to squander this chance to earn a few favors from her. I put in an excellent performance to the point of receiving a standing ovation from the congregation. It was an amazing Wednesday afternoon; I still harbor a vivid mental image of it even fifteen years later. The joy and pride on the face of my then youthful grandmother is etched in my memory. The smiles and hearty introductions to her fellow teachers and catholic nun friends, “this is my grandson, the son of my eldest son. He is in primary three”, and then I would shyly blush, and her friends would tell me that they were proud of me. Up till now, I tend to believe grandmother saw me as a sort of child prodigy based on some of my performances in childhood.
After this whole ordeal at the church, I was exonerated for all my petty wrongdoings that would have otherwise earned me a spanking: I fought with my elder brother on a regular basis, came back from playing football quite late, etc. It is a strange phenomenon and perhaps a failure of the human faculties that a small course of action that leads to the excretion of ‘love’ hormones can blind one to the usual faults of the object of their affection. Maybe this is what they mean when they say love is blind.
Back to the title of the article, I was introduced to the idea of the ‘original sin’ about the same period. Perhaps I would not sound so dumb if I said I took the picturesque descriptions of the temptation of Adam and Eve quite literally, like many kids at that age. And ladies and gentlemen, that was my first introduction to the Bible and the teachings of Christianity. I still do not know if the catechist who taught us took the story literally, to the point of two human beings being seduced by a serpent under the promise of wisdom to be like God, or if she felt that it was the most appropriate way of making us remember her teachings. Regardless of her underlying perspective, her method of teaching worked wonders. I still remember the printed images on billboards detailing to us how the temptation unfolded, like a motion-pictures scene, and my shock at how fallible humans are -that sin entered into the world through something that ridiculous was hard for my young mind to fathom. I remember suddenly seeing Adam and Eve as being responsible for bad things that were happening in the world; death, theft, disease, wars, suffering -all these were courtesy of that couple from the garden of Eden.
Whether one takes the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve as literal truth or as a metaphorical truth is up to oneself. Just like any other book of stories, the Bible can be interpreted as a piece of literature with some truths about the human condition. I actually believe that for maximum output and knowledge, the Bible should be read as a piece of art, like a Shakespeare book, as that saves one from the trappings of dogmatic religious teachings that have an effect of narrowing one’s scope of questioning. I think it contains as many truths as the Bhagavad Gita and the Qur’an and Homer’s Iliad. I often find myself thinking about a passage from the Bible while flaneuring on the streets of the city on random weekends; the city is littered with religious frauds preaching at every corner in an attempt to pull one to follow their obviously delusional pastor; a booming industry where the commission of the salesmen will be paid by God upon entrance into heaven. The industry name for it is ‘winning souls’.
The Biblical story of the fall of man isn’t necessarily a Christian one. There have been many cultures and myths predating Christianity that have had stories with similar themes. It usually goes as follows: there was a supreme entity; a god, goddess or even cosmic forces that created the world, and populated it. He then gave the people, or a given person free-will to choose between good and evil and in most cases, the antagonists chose to do the wrong thing and as a result, his descendants were punished for the wrongs of their forefathers. This pattern can be seen in Genesis, in the Greek mythology of Pandora, or even closer to home, the Agikuyu creation story of the Luhya people of Kenya. They come in different flavors but embody the same themes across time.
The fact that these stories have existed since time immemorial and continue to resonate with many people even today is a testament to some truths in them. Falsities die out over time. They lose their appeal as new more knowledgeable generations come to the scene. However, truths only become stronger and more vibrant with time. There is a reason that as time passes, we develop a stronger admiration for the classical authors or even the writers of antiquity. This is precisely because the truths in their writings become apparent with time; John Steinbeck, Sophocles, Dante, Dostoevsky, Chinua Achebe, Francis Imbuga and a few others come to mind.
Using the same logic, there are truths that must be absolute given how they have endured and beaten down entropy for thousands of years. One such truth that we shall focus on is the Christian story of the fall of man. I’m going to admit that we shall be cherry picking certain passages of the Bible to reinforce the arguments that we shall be making. As evidenced by the first paragraphs of the essay, I am obviously a cultural Christian; and so, whereas the writing is going to be mainly based on an interpretation of some of my idols like Rene Girard, many canonical examples are going to be borrowed from the Bible and contemporary lifestyles.
MIMESIS
When a child is born, aside of the very few actions that are genetically programmed into it, it learns almost all that it can from associating and observing others in its environment. From this logic, it is safe to deduce that a child is not only taught how to desire things but also what to desire. The same applies to adults. Human beings are co-vibrating social animals and so it should not come off as strange that we have the natural inclination to seek validation from others around us. Most of our desires are learned from others around us who we aspire to be like; those possessing a god complex. It is no mistake that even the supreme angel Lucifer aspired to be like her master and in an attempt to rise to His level, she was cast down to the abyss for eternity. It is no mistake that many of those that society admire and aspire to be like have a touch of god in them; maybe through their wealth, influence, power or any other aspect that is reminiscent of the god character.
The desire for the traits of a god, or plainly put, for a state of being that denotes a certain image is the modern version of the original sin. Most of our desires have a metaphysical touch in them; we desire things not for their utility but rather what those things say about us. In the recent past, a tweet went viral about the coach of an English football club, Manchester City F.C, wearing a million-dollar limited edition watch and a netizen hilariously replied that the watch isn’t necessarily for telling time, but rather to let you know what time it is. Of course, it is possible to desire things not only for their metaphysical aspect but also for the utility that they confer to the user.
The Mercedes, the beach side house or the Rolex watch offer the same functionalities as many others on the market, but the social standing that one gains is not the same. Such simple phenomena explain why someone with self-esteem issues would want to dine at a high-end city restaurant that serves tasteless food in exaggerated procedures while the local three-star restaurant offers more tasty meals at a faster and cheaper rate. An even more perverse area where this has been witnessed to detrimental ends is the marriage and dating market. It is one thing to date and have sex with someone because you genuinely love them and enjoy their company vs having sex and dating them for what it would say about you as a person: the ‘trophy wife’ phenomenon. What it really means when someone is termed as a ‘trophy wife’ is that ‘I married you because of the standing I will gain in social cliques by being your spouse’. There is no element of love in its ordinary sense in such relationships. It is a union that is based on the need for prestige, rather than the usual motivation of love for another human being.
Tautologically, if something is said to be prestigious, what that really means is that an exaggerated value has been attached to it beyond its intrinsic value; a sort of inflated sense of normative certainty based on the opinions of others. I am a happy alumnus of one of the ‘prestigious’ traditional schools in the country. Even with hindsight, I still don’t understand the ‘prestigious’ tag and how it came to be, but there is this strong sense among its students and alumni that they are a special breed. The alumni, of course go out there with the tag of feeling special and even establish a sort of classism based on this false sense of superiority. It is no surprise that they will always remind you of their alma-mater in the most unnecessary circumstances, to set the rules of pecking order straight. Or gang into a mob on social media to obliterate anyone who dares to question their assumed sense of self-importance.
The desire of Adam and Eve to be like God that led to the fall of man according to Christian teachings has many resemblances with our desire for a state of ‘being’. In fact, they are the same thing with different faces. Metaphysical desires have a few characteristics: they are abstract; they usually hide their true intentions behind masks in an attempt to make light of their true motivations.
5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Eve made light of her true intentions by masking behind the fruit being good for food and a desirable source of wisdom, even though the true intention was to be like God. In the same way, we usually hide behind other motivations in the pursuit of these metaphysical goals, sometimes unknowingly. A dictator may mask his true intentions by pretending to fight for the rights of the ‘oppressed’ proletarians against the privileged class; the folly that has been responsible for the rise of communist regimes in the 20th century that have obviously always ended up as dictatorships. The true object of the desire of the communist warlords was omnipotence but framed as a class struggle and a fight for prosperity; a game too well played in politics. It was Nietzsche who said that ‘whoever has a why can bear almost any how’, then it must also be true that whoever has a ‘how’ can always cook up any ‘why’.
These desires are powerful to the point of being capable of inducing insanity in otherwise sane people. We usually reflect the desires of those around us who seem to have achieved the perfect state of being, one that we believe if we just strive towards and achieve, we shall become invisible. It is no mistake to find teenagers and even adults admiring billionaires on the Forbes list for no other reasons except their bank balance. Sane and normal people are driven into politics in order to embody the Christ archetype, because indeed, they want to be like Christ. Some go as far as to try and achieve this sacred status through martyrdom. All you need to do is look into politics and the culture of celebrity worship to spot the poster boys.
The strength of these desires overrides reason. It is foolhardy to think that buying one thing will associate us forever; fashion and consumer electronics are by their nature advertised to make one think that if one just upgrades, they will further differentiate themselves and achieve a higher status. The malleable nature of these desires and their pursuit is very unfulfilling in itself. When I was a fourteen-year-old teenager in high school, I desired to own a pair of moccasins and as soon as I got them, it meant nothing, as though I had not spent the previous school year lusting over them. Zara shoes were the new cool things on block, and they instantly became the new objects of my desire. Of course, this is an overtly simplified example, but you get the point. Adults experience the same thing but in more costly and subtle forms.
I will go as far to say that there are many ways of winning a stupid game, and one is not playing the game at all. Perhaps see it this way, there is Sudhir and Elon Musk type of f — — you money and there is the monk’s renouncement of money and all material possessions. The monk, in his renunciation of money and all the goodies that it affords has gained the equivalence of the f- you money without necessarily playing the game.
A good heuristic to use to determine the nature of one’s desire is to examine the underlying motivation. Are you doing something because you genuinely love doing it or are you doing it because it will give you a certain social standing based on the subjective internalizing of the values of others in one’s environment. It is indeed true that one will mirror the values of those in one’s environment. The old saying that ‘you are the average of your five closest friends’ rings true in this case.
Most metaphysical desires are attempts to become like the Biblical God. One wants to attain billions of dollars so that he becomes omnipotent or attempts to gain wide social standing through the media and other means to attain a feeling of omnipresence, akin to the Orwellian Big Brother character or engaging in philanthropy so as gain an air of omni-benevolence. Men so badly want to become like God themselves. And who was the last person to try to be on the same wavelength with God? Lucifer, the fallen angel. It is indeed strange that our desires should bear resemblance to the same creature that we are taught to fervently disdain.
