Hey! This is Beymer, and I am the author of the newsletter “Figuring Things Out”. In this third article on religion, I will be writing about sin and its inheritance. The invention of the concept of sin by the early pioneers of religion was perhaps one of the greatest achievements of mankind. Our predilections for activities that violate religious law make us natural borne sinners, with unlimited capacity for this metaphysical entity called sin. The snake-oil flimflam salesmen SOFS (aka “Priests”, “Preachers”, “Holy men”, or “Shaman”), who created sin, first needed to convince their followers of the existence of sin: Then the SOFS had to convince their followers that they had accumulated sin as a result of their transgressions: Then the SOFS had to convince the sinners that only they, the SOFS, knew how to remove these sins. Just a few swigs of the snake oil for a reasonable price, several Holy Marys after greasing the Priest’s hands, or any of many religious rituals involving some form of renumeration, and the sins would be forgiven or removed from the sinner! The sinner would feel better, and the holy man would get a little wealthier! Everybody would win; except, of course, the targets of your sinful activities.
Returning to the analogy of the programmed robot from my previous article, assume that the robot was programmed with AI that incorporated some learning features. Suppose further that after “training” the robot how to behave in a finite number of scenarios, the robot behaves in a very much undesirable way to a scenario not included in her training. In other words, the robot has sinned or at least been a bad robot! Being its creator, what is my responsibility? Did I program it poorly? Did I use an AI technique that was faulty? Is the robot really bad or is it I that is bad for creating a bad robot? Did I the creator, being all-powerful in the sensors of the robot, intentionally add this “badness” feature or was it an unintended bug or side effect that somehow sneaked in during creation time? Assuming I, the creator, am good, is it really possible for me to create a bad robot or sinning robot? Am I not the very definition of “Good” and isn’t it true that all that come from me must therefore be “Good”? That is, does the concept of sin make any sense at all other than to the SOFS? God is good and all that comes from God must therefore be good. Sin is an abstract entity used by the SOFS to control you, or at least take your hard-earned gains.
So, what am I saying here? Well, we all do things that we regret or feel bad about. We may even do something that hurts someone, maybe even someone we really care about. Do we go to the local SOFS so that we can rid ourselves of these feelings? You can if you wish, and maybe, a few dollars later, you may feel better. However, wouldn’t it be better to seek redemption from those you have transgressed? They will probably never forget what you did, and you will probably remember it too, but at least you will feel better that you tried to remedy the situation and strive to never repeat what you did. The less you deal with the evil middlemen (SOFS), the better you will be and hopefully the better will be those you have transgressed against.
What about all of this the “sins of the fathers” stuff? Well, it seems some holy books may trash this concept, while still upholding the concept of “original sin”. So, just because your parents are evil doesn’t mean you are evil; however, you are borne evil because the actions of the “first” human … that is, the sins of the First Father. Yes, this is rather confusing to say the least. I say all this is just further manipulation by the SOFS. We are not born with “sin” … we do not inherit from our parents, or their parents or from their parents. There is not a “sin” gene in our chromosomes. It is very important that we “teach our children well”!