Freud and other vocal Atheists have
stereotypically used the "Fall of Man" as a point of hypocrisy in the Christian faith. This is their selling point: How can Adam and Eve's choice to eat fruit in the garden curse ALL of mankind? That doesn't seem fair. They feel it is
hypocritical of Christians to proclaim love and in the same breath doom people for hell at birth, just because their ancient ancestors ate some fruit.
I found something interesting while reading Freud's book,
Civilization and Its Discontents, with his explanation of the origin of guilt. He says that once non-rational chimps figured out how to become sentient humans they began to form tribes. Every tribe had a leader, and every family unit had a father. You see, every son both loved and hated his father. He loved the father because the father was protector and provider. However, he hated the father because every son loved his own mother (See Oedipus Complex); every son wanted to be the father because of the father's higher status; and every son saw his father's weak points and resented him for them. The father didn't make the son happy, and the ultimate goal of every human is to be happy by fulfilling his libido. So what happened? The son killed his father. What happened next is the interesting part.
According to Freud, this is where we got our concept of guilt: As soon as the son killed his father, he remembered how much he'd initially loved the father. He also saw how the murder affected his mother--the object of his love--and he realized his premature and
insurmountable tasks of both providing for and protecting himself. The feeling that arose out of all the emotions involved is what we now term "guilt." This is still the going thought for most of the Atheist scholastic world.
Since we have this guilt in our memory from our ancestors, we need redemption, so Freud explains how we, much later, created redemption for ourselves. Naturally, wishfully thinking Christians came up with the image of Jesus Christ and that fixed all the nasty guilt problem. He was at once our "Father" whom we killed and our "Redeemer" who took away the nasty sin. But since He's just a made-up guy, there is actually no hope and so we currently live blissfully on in this false sense of hope. (See my next blog for thoughts on how "no hope" isn't a logical answer.)
This is the Atheist hypocrisy in this thinking: Atheists are simply replacing one "ancestral memory" for another. Either we are sinners because we are born into Adam's curse, or we are born into guilt because caveman ancestors killed their fathers. Either way, guilt...sin...whatever you want to call it, is an
inevitability. Either way, all humanity is doomed.
(Furthermore, the Christian view actually explains why women feel guilt. Freud's view doesn't. Freud never mentions women in this equation at all--except being the mother who is grievous over the loss of her husband. Doesn't that seem a little horrible for women to feel a guilt for which they weren't even responsible? Yet . . . Women are
statistically quicker and more likely to admit guilt than men. No accounting for that. Oh well. Maybe I just don't have a good
understanding of Freud. I've studied his theories for awhile, but this is the first actual book of his that I've read, so maybe he explains it in another book?)
Okay, so let's be fair. I suppose the Christian claim that God is Love is what upsets Atheists. How could a loving God doom all mankind for simply eating fruit? That's just silly. So...do we just replace fruit with killing a guy? Is that more logical? Does it make it easier for me to bear the weight of an ancestral sin if I say that my ancestors were greater sinners than Adam and Eve? Does that somehow make the sin more
transferable to starving little babies born in Africa?
Now, I suppose one could argue that the Freudian view doesn't claim that the world was created perfect, like the Christian view does. There is more at stake in the Christian view, because the Christian view says that the world was created perfectly, and that ALL things were cursed after the Fall--which accounts not only for sin, but also for famine, flood, cancer, etc.. However, a naturally caused universe simply evolved sentient beings who act as they've always acted--with the famines, floods, and cancers always having been present.
But isn't there actually more logically at stake in the second view? Let's think about something for a moment. Freud's case states that guilt originated from ancestors killing their fathers. This means, up to that point, no one felt guilt, get it? This means that everyone went about doing things that didn't make them feel guilty. Do you see the problems here? Freud is either repeating the Christian view which accounts for something like a "perfect sinless environment" where no one felt guilty yet, . . . or else Freud's view must be that killing their fathers wasn't something our ancestors cared about until that magical point in time when they became rational enough to realize what they'd done; in which case we must abandon reason in our analysis of such a theory, because why would our ancestors have cared about an act they'd never cared about before? Either way, he's tracing sin back to a starting point and dooming all humanity to lives ridden with guilt, yet he gives no way out of this. There is vastly more at stake here. Again, no hope. (Next blog. For
reals.)
As harsh as it is for a Christian to say, "We are all fallen," I would argue that it is just as harsh to say, "We are all guilt-ridden because of our murderous ancestry." Either way, it still affects the starving babies, right? That the inescapable problem.
That was Bart
Ehrman's very issue with
Christianity in his book
God's Problem. He kept pointing out that
Christianity is flawed in its promoting this concept of being "fallen" and then saying that poor little starving babies in Africa are just as much to blame for
imperfection as the killer on death row. Ehrman is an agnostic and so therefore finds no answers in Scriptures, having supposedly studied them inside and out. His conclusion? He believed that if we all just band together and do our parts, we can make this a beautiful place. Of course, that is a sweet, sentimental thought, but that
never happens. Why do people think that if we all put forth a small
contribution, that we will eventually make this place wonderful? Does history show us
anywhere where that was even close to possible? Compared to the belief that all the horrible, terrible, demonic people could somehow suddenly stop being so detrimental to the rest of humanity (And that's what it would take, you realize? Not for everyone to do some small piece of good, but rather for everyone to stop being evil.), a belief in God doesn't seem as much of a pipe dream, actually.
[A question arises: "So why have charities and helpful
organizations in place, if small
contributions can't fix the problem anyway?" Ah, but you see, I am not an Atheist; I am a Christian. I believe that these
organizations are good, not because we can fix anything, but because we are all created in God's image, and He commands us to help each other.]
Besides all this, the Freudian view of the origin of guilt comes with no fair warnings! No one warned the cavemen that there were direct
consequences to their actions. There was no "All-Knowing Being" around to tell them anything, because there is a "No All-Knowing Beings Allowed" sign on the Atheist's philosophical door. There is no hope in the Atheist worldview, because it dooms everyone everywhere to guilty feelings that cannot be ignored and can only be repressed for a short time, only to resurface tenfold later (or drive a person to insanity). Guilty feelings are unavoidable. Perhaps Freud could muse them away and blame them on Christians, yet he admitted the fact that guilty feelings are within us and cannot be escaped. A person can only live guilt-free in this world if he is blissfully ignorant of the horrors of this world, and the horrors within himself--in which case, he is a plague upon all his friends and family.
We all know Adam and Eve were warned:
Gen. 2:15-17
15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden;
17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
(They understood, because Eve repeats the
ramifications later in Chapter 3.)
Being born into sin is not a purely
Judeo-Christian worldview. It is a staunchly Atheist worldview as well. For an Atheist to claim that original sin is a mind-trap created by Christians is a huge logistical problem, let alone vastly
hypocritical. This is because guilt and sin are inevitable and
unchangeable by human actions and are paid for by the life, death, and
resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
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