The Unnatural Trinity Of Christian Dogma
A Free Spirit’s Polemic
To be assigned a negative value before one even enters the womb is the most laughably unnatural moralization any human could imagine; provided he has even the most rudimentary intellectual cleanliness about him. And yet for millennia it has infiltrated, infected, and dominated the hierarchy of moral value judgements as the judgment par excellence.
This concept is what’s known as original sin, the Christian doctrine that assigns humankind a befouled nature. The act of conception is portrayed as inherently flawed; consequently it is perverted into something repugnant, loathsome, dirty. Because being born presupposes conception, one is necessarily born dirty. Christ, the mythical messiah of Christianity, was born of a virgin — his mother Mary — who was also free from sin via her own immaculate conception, thereby maculating conception. Because Christ was inserted into the womb by the Holy Spirit — omitting the necessary, natural mechanism of carnality — his conception was clean, pure, untainted by lust.
Through the coalescence of this unnatural trinity of Christian dogma — original sin, the virgin birth and the immaculate conception — an impossible standard is immediately erected. Now that man is presented with this dilemma, how should he resolve it? He must be saved from his sinfulness. He is saved by belief in Christian dogma, and a dedication to its (unachievable) principles that promise a divine reward by virtue of the phantasmagoria of a better life, an afterlife.
Reflecting on one’s nature, it is perhaps taken for granted how often modern man internalizes guilt and shame for the violation of prescribed morals, society’s imposed set of value judgements. Beyond the confines of the religion itself, Christianity has slowly, over millennia, siphoned its malignant doctrine into the pool of social value judgements. There it has festered.
Perhaps the most glaring mechanism for creating this wicked conscience — the guilty conscience of shame — in humanity is through assigning man total causal agency while simultaneously determining his nature: man is caught between free will and determinism. The lines are blurred, and the distinction between them obfuscated for purposes of maintaining the guilty conscience. With the doctrine of original sin, pieces of free will are stripped from man. His nature is predetermined. He was not consulted on this, and Christianity doesn’t care how he feels about it. Because his parents had abominable sexual intercourse (how dare they), he was conceived. It is admittedly nauseating to conceptualize such a doctrine without the red flags of reason flying at full-staff. Yet, one must keep his foot on the head of the snake lest it continue to bite him.
Because man is also assigned causal agency, choice, he feels himself as an agent of his actions. He is a willer, a doer. He perceives himself as having free will. Thus, when he sins, he feels it is his fault, because he could have acted otherwise and deliberately chose not too — his lack of choice in being born a sinner notwithstanding. The trap has been set, and for the Christian, it is escapable by no other means than total belief in the dogma of Christianity, presupposing an endless cycle of internalizing guilt and shame for failing to adhere to unachievable moral standards. Rats do love a wheel.
In Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878), the great polemicist and value theorist, Friedrich Nietzsche, writes: “He who wants to become wise will profit greatly from at some time having harbored the idea that mankind is fundamentally evil and corrupt: it is a false idea, as is its opposite; but it enjoyed dominance throughout the whole ages of history, and its roots have branched out even into us ourselves and our world. To understand ourselves we must understand it; but if we are then ourselves to rise higher, we must rise up above it.” (Aphorism 56)
There is another means of escape from this existential, steel-jaw trap: science, and its spirit of cold, sober, analytical inquiry. Psychological analysis has revealed a wealth of information over the last century and beyond. It hasn’t concluded the debate between free will and determinism, but it has shed light on the depths of human instinct and the unconscious mind: it is estimated that the greater portion of human cognition — and thereby motivations for human behavior — occurs in the unconscious mind. One might think this would lighten the burden of causal agency, of the ego’s uncontested free will and associated accountability for man’s existential plight. It hasn’t.
As the church has gained power over millennia, it has conditioned the minds of its followers, habituating its moral principles into unconscious, programmed patterns of thinking and behaving. These value judgements moved from biblical principles to unconscious habits systematically, until they were eventually etched into the unconscious psyches of countless humans. They became habit, internalized as a way of orienting towards the world. One is not only assigned a negative value at conception, one inherits through social indoctrination and familial rearing an unconscious set of value judgements about himself and the world. These judgements are so etched that they are unquestioned, unexamined and enduring. They exist, infiltrate and infect beyond the walls of the church.
The effects of such malignant machinations are apparent everywhere. Today, what American politician would run for higher office, could succeed, as an atheist? Even an agnostic? It’s unthinkable. The rabble voters, the media, the country would scream: “where are his values?”
How could one have values outside of Christianity? Christianity is thus the arbiter of all value. One need only label something, anything, Christian, and it takes on a flavor of digestibility. For the rabble to accept anyone, he must be digestible, not unlike themselves. He is Christian, therefore knowable. Of course, he can’t have any values of his own, without Christianity, and if he did declare his agnosticism, his opponents would assuredly latch onto this bold, trailblazing spirit like sharks to blood. The real question, the intellectually honest question, is how can any politician call himself Christian with any sense of moral cleanliness? Christian principles of altruistic, unegoistic actions — as if any action could be anything other than egoistic — and asceticism are irreconcilable with political ambition and power-seeking. Yet, Christianity is so intertwined with American culture that it is inescapable as an ethos, even if that ethos is largely unconscious, poorly understood by most and poorly defined. Without it, one is seen as evil, worldly, selfish and decadent. Paradoxically, the Christian is the decadent par excellence, as he turns his back on his naturalness in favor of the allure of divine reward.
The moral backbone of the GOP has always been its “Christian values.” It is, on a superficial level, honest about this as a premier tenet of its platform. However, it also weaponizes these Christian values to attack its more secular opponents’ perceived lack of values, perniciously manifested in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The GOP is more Christian than the Democratic Party, and authentically so, as it were. Paradoxically, sacred life, divinely engineered, is posited to begin at conception, however maculate natural conception may be. Reason be damned.
Yet, it is still unthinkable that a secular, liberal political candidate would declare his separation from Christianity. It would be political suicide. Joe Biden’s catholicism is preferred to Bernie Sanders’ more unfamiliar Judaism, as if either were a prime mover of their political doctrine. An American politician must have his prescribed moral framework on display, and that framework must be the Christian one, or he cannot compete: he must be a sinner, not unlike his voters.
In Human, All Too Human (1878), Nietzsche emphasizes this need for the Christian psyche to have its shameful conscience mirrored in others: “Among the artifices of Christianity is that of proclaiming the complete unworthiness, sinfulness and despicableness of man in general so loudly that to despise one’s fellow man becomes impossible. ‘Let him sin as he may, he is nonetheless not essentially different from me: it is I who am in every degree unworthy and despicable’: thus says the Christian to himself. But this feeling too has lost its sharpest sting, because the Christian does not believe in his individual despicableness: he is evil as a man as such and quiets his mind a little with the proposition: we are all of one kind.” (Aphorism 117)
However, should one’s fellow man be decidedly unchristian, all bets are off, as it were. How dare any man attempt to examine himself, to rise above his sinful nature, casting it off as a snake sheds his skin! When one ceases to have his intellect clouded by the Christian obfuscation of free will and determinism — by this steel-jaw trap of Christian dogma — he unburdens himself from anti-nature. He takes back his naturalness, his right to existence unfettered by toxic value judgements.
A conscious human being eventually comes to understand, with varying degrees of insight, that his earthly plight was somehow predetermined. He feels it, even if he doesn’t consciously reconcile it. He didn’t choose his sex, his race, his parents, his body, his handsomeness or his ugliness, the era in which he was born, and a myriad of other arbitrary circumstances. He didn’t choose to be born. Still, he understands himself as a causal agent of much of it. It somehow must all be his fault. He must somehow be responsible for these circumstances, however arbitrary their coalescence may be. He sins, and he feels his actions premeditated. He experiences himself as the sinner, the doer, the willer of the action. He doesn’t stop to ask himself if he could have behaved any differently, only that he should have. He moralizes himself, mostly unconsciously. A tormenting cognitive dissonance arises. These are his chains. When man ceases to blame himself as the sole agent of his predicament, he removes them.
Once man internalizes that the greater portion of his cognition, and thus his thoughts, actions, motivations and perceptions occur unconsciously, he can begin to unshackle the chains of the unnatural trinity. Shame can be removed from his conscience. He becomes free to blunder, assess his mistakes, and learn from them, without the morbid self-flagellation of a malignant morality; without the shameful conscience. He must learn to love himself, to accept himself, and his nature, without unnecessary, predetermined value judgements; especially without pernicious, archaic doctrines that seek to maculate his very essence. In short, he must become a free-spirit.
A question arises as to why someone would be attracted to such a life-denying moral framework — the Christian one — assuming he wasn’t born into it. In a word: decadence. Decadence and a weak spirit. The aspiring Christian misunderstands himself and his nature. He lacks insight. His instincts frighten him, and he finds himself unable to sublimate his impulses into healthy, creative actions. He requires the radical expedients prescribed by Christianity for extirpating his impulses. He must have them rooted out, removed, rather than effectively implemented into his life. For such a weak spirit, he must have all or nothing, as it were. The doctrine of original sin provides a fitting explanation for his degenerate nature, and this comes as a relief after all the troubles he’s endured on account of it. It all makes sense! There is no strength or intellectual depth necessary for the affirmation of his own values, and thus the cyclical torment and bad conscience of repeated sin prevails. In Twilight Of The Idols (1889) Nietzsche writes: “It is only the degenerate who cannot do without radical expedients; weakness of will, more precisely the inability not to react to a stimulus, is itself merely another form of degeneration.”(53)
Does the chimpanzee need to be saved from himself for the sin of being born? Was he conceived in metaphysical error? Or were his conception and birth part of the natural manifestation of life? It seems silly to think of an ape as sinning, as possessing an inherently dirty, tainted nature. He’s simply an ape, complete with the requisite instincts, honed over eons, that best allow for the endurance of his species. Why is man so different?
