Hedges on sin
One more bit of Hedges, because Eric mentioned that his (Hedges’s) theological training left him befuddled by the idea of ‘original sin,’ and I was planning to quote him on sin anyway if I got the time. Pp 13-14:
We have nothing to fear from those who do or do not believe in God; we have much to fear from those who do not believe in sin. The concept of sin is a stark acknowledgement that we can never be omnipotent, that we are bound and limited by human flaws and self-interest.
Stark, staring bullshit. Could hardly be more wrong. Obviously there is no need whatever to believe in ‘sin’ to be aware that we can never be omnipotent and that we are bound and limited by human flaws and self-interest. Really it’s mostly non-theists who are aware of that in the most thorough way, because theists mostly believe that we will ultimately be ‘redeemed’ or ‘atoned’ in some way. The rest of us just think we are deeply flawed animals and that’s all there is to it.
The concept of sin is a check on the utopian dreams of a perfect world. It prevents us from believing in our own perfectibility.
But the ‘new’ atheists Hedges is railing at dream no dreams of a perfect world, nor do they believe in human perfectibility – so clearly they don’t need the ‘concept of sin’ as a check on their non-existent dreams and beliefs.
To turn away from God is harmless…To turn away from sin is catastrophic…The secular utopians of the twenty-first century have also forgotten they are human.
And Hedges provides quotations to back up this assertion where? Nowhere. Because there are none, because the assertion is false.
We discard the wisdom of sin at our peril. Sin reminds us that all human beings are flawed…Studies in cognitive behavior illustrate the accuracy and wisdom of this Biblical concept.
Wait – what? It’s catastrophic to turn away from sin because without the concept of sin we don’t realize that humans are flawed, but on the other hand, studies in cognitive behavior (not to mention mere experience of life and humans and ourselves) offer evidence that we are flawed, so we don’t need the concept of sin after all. The man blows his own argument (or rather his baseless claim) without even noticing he’s done it. Where was his editor while all this was going on? Where was Hedges’s brain?
Not to mention that human cognitive biases have exactly jack squat to do with being cursed by the LORD for being uppity. Do religious people actually believe the equivalencies they try to draw in their desperate attempts to pretend that science proved them right the whole time?
Where was his editor, indeed – that was my thought throughout.
And who picked that stupid title?!? Most people who say that mean that deep down, so-called “atheists” really believe in God but don’t want to admit it (which is of course, as the Brits say, bollocks), but Hedges here isn’t even saying that.
Oh my! What is one to say to someone who is clearly as dense as Hedges shows himself to be?
Despite his theology degree, he doesn’t know what sin is! Let me quote from the “Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church”:
‘Sin. The purposeful disobedience of a creature to the known will of God. Unlike moral evil it is a fundamentally theological conception.’
So, not only is Hedges wrong, he is radically wrong, because if you turn from God you are sinning, pure and simple. Sin has nothing whatever to do with the flawed nature of human being. It is a purely theological conception which has nothing at all to do with the essential nature of being human (except from a theological perspective), and certainly it has nothing to do with anything that might be discovered by studies of cognitive behaviour.
How does he get away with this? The same way the pope gets away with his coup in the US, where, as you say, Ophelia, it sounds as though everyone must be catholic. It’s because it’s a religious word — ‘sin’, that is — and religion can plough through anything, even the truth. The pope’s been doing it for days now, and there’s not a newpaper in the US that seems to have noticed. Bishops are like generals. Popes are like Field Marshals. No one dares question them. Hedges has the same star quality, don’t forget. He’s a NYT correspondent! It’s like being next to God in the hierarchy of American news reporters. But you shouldn’t be able to get away with this stuff in a book!
Anyway, this crap is the doctrine of Original Sin-lite. What – no mention of the fact that according to orthodox theology you get to go straight to hell, don’t get to pass Go, don’t collect two hundred quid, for some shit Adam did? Funny that.
Yes, G. Tingey, that’s what’s so very odd about Hedges’ argument. He says it doesn’t matter whethere someone believes in God or not, but not believing in sin is dangerous. Well, sin is itself a theological concept. If sin is acting contrary to a known command of God, then turning from God entirely (by not believing in God) is surely the worst and deepest kind of sin.
Hedges primary reason for taking this view is that he thinks the concept of sin describes human nature, which is flawed at its heart. And if fail to recognise the flaw, then we will be bound to ignore a dangerous part of our nature and that will lead us on to act in godlike ways. If we’re not flawed, then we can be perfect, and if perfect, then like a god, and if like a god, what will we not think ourselves competent to do?
The trouble is that the only people who think themselves godlike are those who actually think they possess, within their teachings, a remedy for sin. It’s called faith. And this is something that religious people are likely to have. And that’s why, other things being equal, Hedges is not only wrong about sin, he’s wrong about religion too. And that mistake is a really big one.
Take the first statement that Ophelia quotes: “We have nothing to fear from those who do or do not believe in God; we have much to fear from those who do not believ in sin.” Well, you really have to believe in God to believe in sin, and if you believe in God, this will provide the remedy for sin. And that’s where all the trouble starts, because then you can go on to act under God’s authority. At least that is what religious people do. This should make us very concerned.
Somewhere along the line, Hedges was not paying attention.
I’m imagining this book with ” [citation needed] ” after every sentence…
Put simply, Hedges has confused the idea of human fallibility – the notion that we don’t always behave in the most decent/fair/correct manner – with the concept of sin, which is similar in one sense but inextricably married to a religious system and the idea of going against absolute god-defined morality. It’s unavoidably a theological concept and it’s a nonsense to talk of believing in sin outside of religious belief.
If Hedges is really meaning to say that if people lose a sense of morality/ethics/right-and-wrong then we are in trouble he should say so but to use the word ‘sin’ seems to be ignorant of its basic meaning. If on the other hand he does mean it in a religious sense, then this is confusing: it implies that he thinks only a religious sensibility can give people moral grounding, which is firstly wrong and secondly contradictory since he otherwise suggests that not believing in god (and thus by extension religion) is harmless.
Talk about muddled…
“The question is…whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
I agree with resistor that the use of that dictionary definition is not in line with the obvious alternative meaning the author intended.
Sadly, fixing that doesn’t make his argument as represented here much more coherent. It starts from confounding the idea of moral relativism or maybe nihilism with the idea of sin, via a possible assumption that sins and moral wrongs are a very similar pair of categories. Only the shallowest modern feelgood pc churches teach that, IMHO.
I am pretty sick of bullshit at the moment; a nice new guy at our church talked creationism at me after the service, and then I went to a healing service where the speaker, shipped from the US, started by telling us about a couple of cases of people being raised from the dead on his watch, went on to claim hundreds of healings from recent services, then demonstrated how he counts these healings. He had us in a period of prayer and hands-on between the audience members, then asking for a show of hands on who had their pain go away, who their cruciatus ligaments restored, who their scars, lumps or tumours vanished. There was no attempt to confirm medically, or distinguish between the list of outcomes, so 100 people having their tinnitus abate momentarily would have been counted the same as 100 restorations of amputated limbs. In an audience of about 600, a placebo pill distribution might have done better than the 120 hands he counted.
Pleeuch, ptaaagh.
My sincerest sympathy! But why the hell do you go? Investigative journalism? To make sure the idiocies we discuss are a fact rather than our fiction? Or do you believe there is no link between church & idiocy, wanting to have your church & reason too?
Not knowing anything about Hedges, what makes his intended alternative meaning so obvious. I’ve seen quotes and a long discussion contra but a mere couple of lines in Hedges’ defense.
ChrisPer,
My mum had a similar reaction when she witnessed the ‘Toronto Blessing’ first hand…
She, like thee, is a “cherry-picker” too… :-)
As for “resistor”, I’m curious…may I ask what it is you’re specifically ‘resisting’?
Or are you just out to ‘impede’ the ‘flow’? ;-)
Chris: “But why the hell do you go?”
I fell in love with the right girl, 22 years ago. Decided to swallow the hook with the bait, and its been 100% good.
The healing service was her idea, in regards to a debilitating cough I have had for 10 years. I am thinking of taking up smoking so I have a reason for the cough…
Sure, resistor, the word ‘sin’ can have a variety of meanings. For instance, ‘That chocolate is simply sinful,” means that that the chocolate is particularly good. ‘That’s a sin,’ often means, ‘That’s too bad.’
But our friend Hedges is using it in a traditional setting. He wants to use in, as Augustine does, to contrast human beings with something. With what, then? God is really the only option here. In fact, he says it. The problem with human beings is that we are sinful, that is, deeply flawed, and when we don’t acknowledge this, we think we can be gods. And therein lies the whole problem for Hedges. When we don’t recognise out built-in defect, we imagine that we can achieve godlike perfection, and the outcome is destruction.
Now, Hedges thinks we can retain the idea of sinfulness, even original sinfulness, without the concept of God. But we can’t. It is a theological concept. It refers to a contrast between Creator and creature. For Hedges, clearly, atheism leads inevitably to the kind of hubris in which human beings think they are godlike, and when that happens there is predictable disaster.
But he doesn’t show us that atheists evince this kind of hubris. He couldn’t say this with regard to Dawkins or Dennett or even Harris and Hitchens. Hitchens keeps repeating that we are a variety of mammals with limited understanding and affection. Harris speaks about religious belief as achieving escape velocity from the limited realm of the human, etc. Perhaps their political judgements are wrong. Harris’ digression on torture is troubling and unnecessary. But it’s not an expression of unbounded optimism or utopianism. And if Hedges does really mean what he says, then calling them ‘secular utopians’ is about as wide of the marks as you can get.
But then to go on and say, “We discard the wisdom of sin at our peril. Sin reminds us that all human beings are flawed …. Studies in cognitive behavior illustrate the accuracy and wisdom of this Biblical concept.,” is to get it wrong on two or three counts. First, the idea of ‘original sin’ is not biblical, certainly not Old Testament biblical, and doubtfully New Testament, though Paul borders on it. Second, cognitive studies could not confirm the doctrine of original sin. If it has shown that we are morally and cognitively limited, it still hasn’t been shown that we have a basic flaw in our nature, or that we have fallen from original perfection, or whatever. It just shows that we’re human. The concept of sin is an import from another language game. Third, the idea of perfection or perfectibility comes from religion. If we had never had the idea of a perfect (divine) realm, perhaps we’d have been happier with ourselves. We wouldn’t keep comparing ourselves to impossible models. And so many humans would not have made earth a place of discipline and misery trying to overcome limitations that are natural and inevitable for finite beings like us. Like Socrates, we would more often come to the conclusion that we don’t know, and then seek better answers to old questions.
Meanwhile, Hedges should recall that Dr Pangloss is a stand-in for Leibniz, who believed that we live in the best of all possible worlds already. Panglossian utopianism is all around you, don’t you know? We can’t achieve a better world!
Chris, I can dig that: love first. But there has to be a limit somewhere, no?
I don’t know about possible worlds, but this may be the best that there is. It is, as you say, a horrible thought.
Job:”Chris, I can dig that: love first. But there has to be a limit somewhere, no?”
Yes. We went to a full-on spirit-ruled lunatic asylum for a while. When peoiple asked what I thought of it, I said I though they were unhinged, or that they had turned off the gift of discernment. I used to go outside to the loo and not come back. And the cough is a great way to excuse yourself too – “excuse me while I go outside and puke” – all through a smokescreen of hacking and spluttering.
It didn’t help that I was reading Cialdini at the time and could see so many of his influence triggers in operation.