[ExI] Original sin

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:00 AM,  Ben <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:

> William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > What would be an even better idea is to get rid of the idea that spawned
>  > the whole thing:   original sin.
>
> Yes indeed.  I'd known about this idea for a long time, but it was only
> after talking to a catholic about it* and learning that many people
> *literally* believe in it that I realised what a vile concept it really
> is.  It was then that I started thinking of religion in general, and the
> catholic church in particular, as an active force for evil in the world.
>
> Ben Zaiboc
>
> * That was the first time I can remembering actually getting angry about
> how stupid someone was.  Maybe because this wasn't just shake-your-head
> stupid, but /dangerous/ stupid.

What you say may be true, but the doctrine of original sin is brilliant.

This is a snip from something I wrote in December, 1986.

What Gazzaniga did is to present each side of the brain with a simple
conceptual problem.  The left side saw a picture of a claw, and the right
side saw a picture of a snow scene.  A variety of cards were placed in
front of the patient, who was asked to pick the card which went with what
he saw.  The correct answer for the left hemisphere was a picture of a
chicken.  For the right half-brain, it was a snow shovel.

        "After the two pictures are flashed to each half-brain, the
    subjects are required to point to the answers.  A typical response is
    that of P.S., who pointed to the chicken with his right hand, and the
    shovel with his left.  After his response, I asked him, 'Paul, why
    did you do that?  ' Paul looked up and without a moment's hesitation
    said from his left hemisphere, 'Oh, that's easy.  The chicken claw
    goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken
    shed.'"

        "Here was the left half-brain having to explain why the left
    hand was pointing to a shovel when the only picture it saw was a
    claw.  The left brain is not privy to what the right brain saw
    because of the brain's disconnection.  Yet the patient's own body was
    doing something.  Why was it doing that?  Why was the left hand
    pointing to the shovel?  The left brain's cognitive system needed a
    theory and instantly supplied one that made sense given the
    information it had on this particular task. . ."

    I think the concept of original sin was constructed by the same human
mental mechanism that provided Paul's chicken shit theory.  The inference
engine was a milestone in our evolution.  It works far more often than it
fails.  But as you can see from the example, our inference engines will
wring blood from a stone;  you can count on them finding causal relations
whether they exist or not.  Worse yet, the inference engine probably can't
detect it when it doesn't have enough data.  Even if it could, it has no
way to tell the verbal (conscious) self.

    As a result, this piece of our mental hardware can get us into some
awful tangles;  liberal guilt and original sin, for example.  A plausible
origin for the concept of original sin comes from the engine being given
two factors:  the unavoidable observation of human suffering and death
without just cause;  and the logical unacceptability of an unjust or less
than all-powerful God to our cultural forebears.  The concept that the
death of infants is a punishment for "wired in" original sin seems to have
been the product of inference engine activity trying to find a cause for
suffering and death.  As an "explanation" it rates right up there with
Paul's theory about the shovel.

http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8612.txt

One of the really nice things about the net is that if you say
something well once (and can find it again) you don't have to spend a
lot of time constructing the argument again.  :-)

Keith