“What are we to make of the thought that Jesus died for our sins?” asks Elizabeth Anderson in her article If God is Dead, is everything permitted? This core religious teaching of Christianity takes Jesus to be a scapegoat for humanity but the practice of using scapegoats contradicts the whole moral principle of personal responsibility.
“If God is merciful and loving, why doesn’t He forgive humanity for its sins straightaway, rather than demanding His 150 pounds of flesh in the form of His own son?”
The Doctrine of the Atonement was made up by Paul of Tarsus, as Will Durant explains: “Recalling Jewish and pagan customs of sacrificing a ‘scapegoat’ for the sins of the people, Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ: namely, that every man born of woman inherits the guilt of Adam and can be saved from eternal damnation only by the atoning death of the son of God.”
The idea that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children is contrary not only to the moral principle of personal responsibility but also to every principle of moral justice.
In one of his treatises, Kant asked: “How did evil in human nature begin? Not through original sin. Surely, of all the explanations of the spread and propagation of evil through all the members and generations of our race, the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents.”
So it comes as no surprise that the philosophes of 18th-century France “laughed at original sin, and the God who had to send himself down to earth as his son, to be scourged and crucified to appease the anger of himself as Father piqued by a woman’s desire for apples or knowledge” (Will Durant, The Age of Voltaire).
John Guillaumier
St Julian's