The Action of Psychedelics on Original Sin
/It always strikes me how many people I am in conversation with at some point will talk about feeling broken, flawed, useless beyond hope, and other expressions of not just feeling bad, but feeling they are bad. Is this just something we have to put up with as part of the human condition, or has it just been culturally ingrained in us – let’s say for at least 1500 years? That’s a lot of momentum, but I think it is fair to say that if psychedelics are valuable to us, it is because they contradict this message, telling us that we are not blighted after all. They pitch an undeniable experience (or can, when the winds are right) against the inherited belief that we are innately bad: at our core, somewhat to our surprise, we find a divine light we knew nothing about. Actually, we can be quite nice.
The old belief that we are rotten to the core, or rather rotten from the core, connects, in our culture at least, with the teaching of original sin, that by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve broke God’s law and passed the guilt of that sin on to everyone who came after them, right up to the next little baby that pops into this world, wherever they may be. That belief, or theory of human nature, is not in the Bible itself, and although Adam and Eve both get punished, the word sin is not used anywhere to describe them.
According to James Boyce in his book Born Bad, it was in the Fifth Century with Augustine of Hippo that the original sin theory crystalized, leading to lots of controversies in church doctrine. For instance, why should we baptize babies? After all, it’s not like they are choosing anything themselves. The reason for it is that baptism clears them of Adam’s sin and allows them entrance to heaven. Which brings us to what became a centuries-long theological controversy: if we all carry the sin of Adam, then little babies who die before they are baptized must surely go into the fires of hell, suffering unspeakable pain for eternity. Which hardly seems fair to the poor mites, and many churchmen, like 18th century American preacher Jonathan Edwards, were forced into rather extreme positions just to make sense of themselves:
As innocent as children seem to be to us, if they are out of Christ, {i.e. not baptized} they are not so in God’s sight, but are young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers.
Jacobs, Original Sin
While here is what John Calvin, him of Calvinism fame, had to say on the subject:
Calvin stressed that “the impurity of the parent is so transmitted to the children that all, without a single exception, are polluted as soon as they exist”, and that because all people at their birth have received the “pollution to which the punishment is justly due,” there could be no respite in limbo or purgatory for babies or anyone else who had not been saved by faith in Christ. Babies were not innocent: their “whole nature is as it were a seed of sin, and therefore cannot but be odious and an abominable to God.” Even in the womb, “before we behold the light of life…we are in the sight of God defiled and polluted.”
James Boyce, Born Bad
Ouch! Why so mean?
There is a good reason, or rather, a coherent one. If in Christianity there was a gospel of salvation that needed to be spread, what exactly was this to be a salvation from? What was to be a compelling reason to go to church instead of sacrificing to Hermes or whoever? And just as important, if you could just traipse into this world sinless and, in theory at least, stay that way, more or less, by being a generally good person pretty much unaided, then what exactly was Christ’s sacrifice of dying on the cross for?
But it all falls into place if there was an original sin that the Savior saved humanity, all humanity, including all those pagans, from. Otherwise why did he bother to put himself out? He wasn’t just some inspired rabbi who was dealt with by the authorities and then caught up in an ancient mythos of dying and reviving gods – surely? Sorry little unbaptized babies, but if it’s either you going to Hell or Christ’s salvation not making coherent sense, so you’ve just got to take the hit on this one. That is what the churchmen decided as they stood between a rock and a very hard place. And in a sense we are all taking that hit, because this belief about our innate horribleness has been drummed into us, century after century, until we start to believe those idiots, and tell our therapists about this weird sense of innate badness inside us.