i know that as a catholic you just have to believe with what the church says but i really dont like the belief of the original sin, i feel like its such a horrible thing to believe about yourself and about other human beings too
There are actually ways of legitimately dissenting from less essential Church teachings in a way that leaves you in good standing with the Church; I'm not sure if Original Sin is one of those things, though, to be honest.
But, anon, I'm going to offer another perspective here, starting from a quote (perhaps ironically?) from my favorite heretic. One of the things that James Carroll believes is that Original Sin has been given a bad wrap. In Constantine's Sword, he says:
I referred to Augustine’s assertion of the idea that the human condition implies a perennial state of finitude, weakness, and sin, all of which will be overcome, even for the Church, only with the end of time. [...] Augustine is thus regarded as the father of a severe, flesh-hating, sin-obsessed theology, but that dark characterization misses the point of his insight. His honest admission of the universality of human woundedness is a precondition for both self-acceptance and the forgiveness of the other, which for Augustine always involved the operation of God’s grace, God’s gift. Only humans capable of confronting the moral tragedy of existence, matched to God’s offer of repairing grace, are capable of community, and community is the antidote to human woundedness. Augustine sensed that relationship as being at the heart of God, and he saw it as being at the heart of human hope, too. This is a profoundly humane vision.
I wish I had understood the spirit of this quote when I was in high school. I remember learning in my World History class that Islam teaches that all children are born good, and then the world makes them evil. And I remember my teacher asking how that compares with Christianity, and I raised my hand and said that Christianity teaches that all of us are born evil. Because I believed that at the time. And, really, the whole framing of that question was wrong and gave really simplistic representations of what Islam and Christianity teaches, but I don't think we're alone in having internalized that understanding, anon. And that's a shame.
I thin it's important to remember the worldview that the doctrine of Original Sin is actively defending us against; there was an idea, that gets called "Pelagianism" (the poor guy it got named after may not even have believed it), that said that humans were capable of being saved on their own, by their own power. Someone on this site recently asked what people's thoughts on Pelagianism were, so you can read my thoughts here. But to keep it short and sweet, I think Original Sin is an important doctrine because it saves you from the need to be perfect.
There are ways to treat Original Sin that I think are certainly unhealthy, and I think the doctrine can be a source of anxiety and fear. But I also think, very deeply, that Original Sin should be a reason why we treat ourselves and especially our neighbor with kindness and understanding. I can look at myself and say "What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. […] For I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil I do not want" (Romans 7:15, 19). And I can say that because I know I am ontologically wounded; that all of us have our weaknesses. That while we may still be in the moral wrong for committing a morally wrong action, our wills are compromised in a way that causes us to incline towards the comfortable and the easy rather than the good.
I wish I could go back in time and tell that class that Christianity does not teach that people are born evil. I wish I could go back and tell them that it teaches that we are born in a state of dis-integration, that we are wounded beings yearning for wholeness; alienated beings seeking everlasting belonging; beings lost in darkness, seeking the light. But I can say it now: the doctrine of Original Sin doesn't have to be an occasion to think you're depraved and without value, but it can be an invitation to come to terms with your own woundedness, because doing that (to use the words of Lutheran theologian Nancy Eiesland) "opens a space for the inflowing of grace and acceptance."
An era-shaping threshold is being crossed at a weapons plant in the high plains country of the Texas Panhandle, writes James Carroll.
Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the first of a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons had rolled off the assembly line at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in the panhandle of Texas. That warhead, the W76-2, is designed to be fitted to a submarine-launched Trident missile, a weapon with a range of more than 7,500 miles. By September, an undisclosed number of warheads will be delivered to the Navy for deployment.
What makes this particular nuke new is the fact that it carries a far smaller destructive payload than the thermonuclear monsters the Trident has been hosting for decades — not the equivalent of about 100 kilotons of TNT as previously, but of five kilotons. According to Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the W76-2 will yield “only” about one-third of the devastating power of the weapon that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Yet that very shrinkage of the power to devastate is precisely what makes this nuclear weapon potentially the most dangerous ever manufactured. Fulfilling the Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-war-fighting “flexibility,” it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used. This is the weapon that could make the previously “unthinkable” thinkable.
There have long been “low-yield” nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear powers, including ones on cruise missiles, “air-drop bombs” (carried by planes), and even nuclear artillery shells — weapons designated as “tactical” and intended to be used in the confines of a specific battlefield or in a regional theater of war. The vast majority of them were, however, eliminated in the nuclear arms reductions that followed the end of the Cold War, a scaling-down by both the United States and Russia that would be quietly greeted with relief by battlefield commanders, those actually responsible for the potential use of such ordnance who understood its self-destructive absurdity.
Ranking some weapons as “low-yield” based on their destructive energy always depended on a distinction that reality made meaningless (once damage from radioactivity and atmospheric fallout was taken into account along with the unlikelihood that only one such weapon would be used). In fact, the elimination of tactical nukes represented a hard-boiled confrontation with the iron law of escalation, another commander’s insight — that any use of such a weapon against a similarly armed adversary would likely ignite an inevitable chain of nuclear escalation whose end point was barely imaginable. One side was never going to take a hit without responding in kind, launching a process that could rapidly spiral toward an apocalyptic exchange. “Limited nuclear war,” in other words, was a fool’s fantasy and gradually came to be universally acknowledged as such. No longer, unfortunately.
Only connect. –E.M. Forster The act of taking on the perspective and feelings of others is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes. Proust’s de…. Powered by AutoBlogger.co
Hey guys, I’ve finally finished a story I’ve been working on sporadically over the course of the last year and I decided to post it. It’s a little longer than some of the other stuff I post, but I really would appreciate anyone who’s willing to take a look at it or give any sort of feedback! I’ve gone back and forth on posting this here, but I’m heavily considering trying to submit this for publication through a literary magazine to get my foot in the door. Thank you again for any and all support! It’s incredibly appreciated.
Montana
“I didn’t know that I really loved her when she first entered my life; I knew when she first left it. And despite all of it being a huge misunderstanding—an argument taken out of proportion and a lapse in our otherwise incomparable connection—I could barely handle myself those times I thought she was out of my life for good. Most love stories will tell you that you’ll fall in love with someone upon first sight, but sometimes it’s the first taste of love’s abandonment that teaches you what you’d never want to lose...”
When I first met Alyssa, I was too wound up in my own head to even know that she’d mean much of anything in my life. In retrospect, I should have known by the seamless conversations that we shared—the ones that would go late into nights over the phone—that something was there. I couldn’t even really tell you when or how this all began and sometimes that eats away at me considering how much she still means to me. I still look for the storybook, glimmering first day that I met her—the first time I saw her or even the first time my feelings started changing for her. I was never really sure when things began to bloom and when things began to fall apart. It still bothers me.
It has always been hard coming to terms with the fact that I won’t always remember every moment I’d ever spend with someone that means the world to me. In the times where she’d vanish from my life, I wanted to replay the good times from start to finish, but I could only recall small bits and pieces of how things once were. I could tell anybody that we’d go days on days on days talking to each other every minute despite how great the distance between us or how busy I was, but I could never recall what exactly it was that we talked about. I couldn’t even recall what I felt the last night she was here before she had to pack her things and move away with her family. I knew I had always coped with her leaving by telling her that I’ve always wanted to visit Montana because there was so much to do there. Now the distance weighs heavy on me.
She would always tell me that people have the wrong impression of what Montana is like. This, like the last couple times she told me she loved me, was something that I couldn’t possibly convince myself were true. Every time I’d watch her soft lips move around the word Montana, I thought about her sitting out on her porch, miles away from the nearest town, sunset to her and the mountain’s back. I knew she liked this kind of solitude, but I didn’t see it as that. I saw it as being alone. Alone was the last thing I ever wanted to be. It was before I met her, and now that I had met her, it’s undoubtedly my most debilitating fear.
During the summer of my seventh grade year, I spent a weekend out in Grass Valley or some surrounding area that my uncle owned property in. While I can’t seem to remember much of how life with Alyssa began, I could remember this weekend so clearly that you’d figure each of those recorded memories meant something profound to me. But they were simple times. I remember playing in the lazy stream that ran through the back of the property—the one that my uncle would repeatedly tell me that my mother almost drowned in when she was my age. I remember how there was a bedroom in the back of the house where I was told to go to change into dry clothes that was so neatly kept and untouched that the sunlight through the faint, dusty curtains made the whole room feel eerie. I remember the stillness of the room being so disturbing that I’d let my eyes trace along with dancing flicks of dust gently guiding through the musky, sunlit air just to assure myself I wasn’t completely frozen with time. I remember every detail of the doll sitting between the two pillows at the head of the bed. I remember that she had blue eyes and curled pigtails that spun exactly three and a half times on each side, a white dress with light pink polka dots that you wouldn’t be able to see unless you were close enough to touch her, and her mouth just agape enough to make me think she was about to say something. Admittedly, I was terrified of this room. Maybe fear is the glue that makes memories stick.
My cousins who were with me knew that I was afraid, just as they were. We took turns locking each other in the room to see who could stay in the longest before slamming our fists on the door and begging to be let out. I don’t know what the others did when it was their turn, but when the door locked shut the first time for me, I immediately turned my back toward the doll sitting at the head of the bed. On top of a dresser tucked away in the back of the room, I noticed a black metal box. Something about it seemed so out of place compared to the rest of the room. My eyes honed in on the nicks and scratches on the box, chipping away to reveal shiny silver, and lead back to the unlocked latches, hanging down to show the box could be opened by anyone. I remember pulling the box off of the top of the dresser and setting it on the floor before sitting there in silence to look at the pistol laying within it. My cousins came into the room to see if I had passed out from fear of being in the room. But what came next was each of us touching the pistol, then my cousin Tommy daring me to pull it out of the box and put it in my mouth since I was “the craziest out of all of us” as he put it.
I didn’t let them down. My lips quivered as I wrapped them around the barrel. My tongue moved to the back of my mouth fearing that a flick of the tongue could make the weapon fire. Even though I only held it there for a few moments, my mouth still feels stained by the metallic taste, the same taste left when your mouth bleeds and leaves your tongue soaked. We all laughed for some reason, maybe the absurdity of finding a gun and being able to all touch it for the first time. We were just kids, after all. We didn’t know any better.
Two years later, my uncle shot himself with that gun. We weren’t laughing, but we still didn’t know any better. I can recall the morning where about a dozen of us gathered in a half-circle around his coffin in what felt more like a formality than a funeral. I had always thought that funerals would be filled with weeping relatives consoling each other in arms because they had lost someone who was taken from them. But this wasn’t like that. I remember the murmurs in the small group talking about how selfish he was to put his pain on the family. I remember the way that my mother cursed toward the sky because she was angrier with him than she was with God. I stood in the back with my little sister who was too young to even understand the finality of death while we listened to our mother proceed on with her cavalcade of curse words toward a god I wasn’t even sure she believed in anymore. As I tucked my head down to my chest wishing that the day would just end, I remember overhearing a couple of relatives I didn’t recognize saying that he had done it because his wife died in a car crash driving up to the valley after an argument they had. It was impossible for either of us to imagine our uncle offing himself just because his wife had died. I could easily imagine, for some reason, the way his body slumped over on its side after shooting himself dead amongst the trees just past the lazy stream we’d splash around in. But I couldn’t understand how guilt could weigh that heavily. And I surely couldn’t imagine how anyone could miss someone so much. I guess that’s what distance can do to you.
One thing I do remember about my times with Alyssa is the first night that we were on the phone together since she had moved to Montana. I sat in the near-empty parking lot outside of Costco right after my closing shift, in my car with the heaters turned off because I didn’t want it to drown out the sound of her voice. I remember when she jokingly asked me what I’d do if my car broke down in the mountains on my way to go see her, and I told her that I’d sleep in the car until morning came. She was adamant that I’d freeze to death because any car without a heater would be like a tin can in those elements. I called her Bear Grylls and laughed along with her, but even sitting in the car in the parking lot that late at night while I waited for her to pick up her phone had me shaking. Maybe it wasn’t just the cold.
What our conversation was about wasn’t particularly important, but I still knew talking to her was what I wanted. Because of Alyssa, I was beginning to let feelings dictate my actions. If I felt something, I’d say it. If I wanted something, I’d be honest about it. There was no sense in me holding myself back from the few things in life that seemed to fuel me. This was no different. We were talking about something and I made her laugh—I don’t know what I said to make her laugh, but I wish I could say it over and over again to keep hearing that sound—and the feeling just seemed to fall out of me: “I love you, Alyssa.” In her silence, I remember panicking. Had I ruined something we already had? What was even the advantage of telling her this when nothing would change? We were still hundred of miles apart. We already talked to each other like lovers. What more could I possibly want out of this?
“I love you too,” came back to me, timidly. This was the beginning.
There was a time when I almost considered apologizing for saying that I loved her even though I wasn’t really sure at the time. I kept looking for confirmation that she was what I wanted, not just someone who could fill a hole that I’ve felt in my life for years.
I always hated talking on the phone, but I still called her at least once a week because I felt sick going without hearing her voice for that long. I hated talking to my family about anything going on in my personal life, but there were some mornings where I’d wake up so in love with Alyssa that I couldn’t help but spill those thoughts across the breakfast table. And most jarringly, I actually began dreaming of one day going to Montana just to surprise her—to be with her and properly love her the way I should have when she was still here.
When I was six or seven years old, I was at the boardwalk with my extended family. The boardwalk, or amusement parks in general, were always a terrible experience for me considering my crippling fear of heights. Of course, my entire family wanted to go onto the Sky Glide, a seemingly-unsteady collection of lifts hanging fifty feet off the ground that would take you from one end of the boardwalk to the other. While everyone else was enthusiastic about it, piling onto those contraptions as if their lives weren’t at risk, I refused to go. My aunt—thank goodness—agreed to stay behind and walk the distance of the boardwalk to meet the rest of the family on the other side. I remember hanging my head and watching me feet, counting the steps we took across the old wooden boardwalk as the rest of our family hung somewhere above us. My aunt would glance over at me while I did this, sensing that I was embarrassed by the whole ordeal. Breaking the silence, she consoled me, “One day you’ll find someone that you’re willing to risk things for, even if it terrifies you.”
Alyssa is that someone. And my aunt was right, I would do anything and everything to see her again, even if it meant taking one of those Sky Glides from the boardwalk all the way up the mountains in Montana. I would do it for her.
