Post: #1

Inspired by Samsaeu's post about premarital sex, I wanted to take the time to write out my thoughts on how sin and evolution. Christians like to deny evolution and natural selection as being contrary to the bible. However they are very much inextricably linked.

Before I begin, we can define sin as anything that goes against Jesus' only two commandments:

Quote:Matthew 22:37-40New International Version (NIV)

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Humans like to think that we are above nature. Evolution does not affect us as it seems that we have supposedly stalled in our evolutionary progress.

We breed horses, dogs, pigs, and cats to have amiable personalities for domestication purposes. It is foolish to think that humans are exempt from this as well.

Humans are very much subject to evolution but in ways that we cannot easily quantify. As i've gotten older, i've come to notice how personality traits from both parents manifest in children. I have identified personality traits within myself that I can clearly point out in both of my father and mother as well as in other people. The kaleidoscope of how you view this world is very much dictated by the two people who brought you onto this Earth.

Nature plays far more of role than nurture than we are willing to admit. Does that remove all responsibility from the individual? Not at all, we still have free will. It is safe to assume that our genetic personality is a wish, you still have to take action in order to fulfill that genetic potential.

Take for example people who engage in homosexuality. The bible does not have many nice things to say about homosexuality. We all know it is no secret that homosexual men are the most promiscuous people on the planet with notch counts exceeding 100+.

STD rates are highest in gay men for a reason. Whether it's a lack of children or an incurable disease, high sex drives coupled with unnatural sexual releases are nature's way of saying, "your genes are unfit for the next generation." Take this time to ponder the meaning of the phrase, "Sin pays its wages in death."

What about women that forsake motherhood to partake in the notorious cock carousel? These women will go on to ride the carousel until their late 30s when they immediately realize their time to have children is almost over.

The bible goes on in length to describe premarital sex as bad and women love sex just as much as men if not more. The cost of indulging in this passion of the flesh eventually leads these women to not have children thanks to modern birth control and abortion. While her sinful acts won't immediately lead to death, without any children her genetic lineage dies with her. It seems that once again sin has paid a full paycheck of death to a maternal line (or nature removing unfit genes).

While these are only a few examples, this rule isn't hard and steadfast. It seems that straight heterosexual men can get away with promiscuity and other hard acts of the spirit destruction. However in days gone by, men were the first to die out in either war, hard labor, or sickness. With modern medicine we can obviously delay that and forestall the such effects. However it's only a matter of time before antibiotics become ineffective against STDs and a major war has men from all walks of life called to defend their homelands.

Sin is a multifaceted spiritual concept and the things I previously outlined above are only one manifestation of it. You can obviously still have children and proceed to lead a promiscuous life. However there are many more unintended consequences of such behavior on the mother and children that will manifest itself in either poor impulse control (leading to crime) or all around poor parenting repeating acts that would lead to the death of a genetic line.

Moral of the story, find pure and chaste women to have many children with so you pass nature's test.

Post: #2

Christianity makes a distinction about living according to the flesh vs living according to the spirit. I think this is parallel to the idea of man living in a theoretical state of nature, vs man living in civilization.

For man to live in civilization, many of his base impulses must be restrained. You obviously can't go around killing people who piss you off. You want people to form monogamous relationships and raise families, and to teach their children to do the same. You can't have people going around stealing.

When you make a list of the kind of natural impulses people have, that need to be restrained to enable civilization, you end up with a list of sins. Therefore, I would say that in the state of nature, where survival of the fittest was the rule, people acted like animals, and our underlying "fleshly" impulses were shaped. At some point, communities of modern humans began to form, and social impulses began to restrain these "animal" impulses. At that point, human evolution began to be shaped not just by survival of the fittest individuals, but by survival of the fittest communities. Those communities that developed a more effective set of social restraints tended to be more competitive, and they grew and expanded in area as a consequence.

Bringing this around full circle then, proto-humans were sinful during their process of evolution, by the standards of civilization. The coming of organized communities with their social restraints brought the concept of sin into existence. However, from here, evolution still continued, but now the most effective vector towards a higher level of evolution was to be a successful member of a thriving community.

Post: #3

I can't wait for either Samseau or Scorpion to chime in on this.

G

Post: #4

One tangential point here is that when you look at many of the food-based ordinances out of Exodus/Deuteronomy, they are as much public health initiatives as they are religious commandments. No shellfish, no sex during menses, cook your food a certain way, don't sow two crops side-by-side (because of the issue of cross-pollination or making reaping inefficient) -- these are all things which can be interpreted as basic common sense for an exiled people who are survivalists. Whether or not they were intended that way is another matter, but it's...intriguing, to say the least.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #5

Beast, your conclusions are not new.

The idea of the "wages of sin is death" combines with the preface of the Ten Commandments.

Exodus 20:

Quote:5 Thou dost not bow thyself to them, nor serve them: for I, Jehovah thy God, [am] a zealous God, charging iniquity of fathers on sons, on the third [generation], and on the fourth, of those hating Me,

6 and doing kindness to thousands, of those loving Me and keeping My commands.

So back in the 1960's you saw the sexual revolution across Western Nations, abandonment of Christ, and now look at the shit we're in today as the third and fourth generations come into existence. And shit is probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

The ideas of cultural evolution have been around since the Bible introduce these concepts to us. The Bible IS THE BOOK ON SURVIVAL. The Commandments (updated with Jesus's teachings) are what is necessary to create a strong civilization.

Premarital sex is toxic, but how it is sinful varies for men and women, which I've outlined in another thread on this forum. It is far worse for women however, that there can be no doubt. It destroys their reproductive potential.

Post: #6

(03-13-2016 09:17 PM)Samseau Wrote:  Beast, your conclusions are not new.

The idea of the "wages of sin is death" combines with the preface of the Ten Commandments.

Obviously, I know that. The bible spends oodles of time talking about "Death". Fun side note, in my bible study days we talked about how there is really more than one type of death discussed in the bible. The three types of death being heart stopped death, spiritual death, and the death of a blood line. The last one is the oddest one of all.

I should have added above that the point I was trying to make however is to try running this past a southern baptist preacher or die hard evangelicals who see evolution as an affront to their beliefs. This is my litmus test for whether or not they've adapted spiritual discernment. A short of means to divide the ones who think critically about spirituality versus those who just blindly follow what was given to them.