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Comment by tehwalrus | Hacker News Reader

umm, no it isn't (I mean, maybe he did say something like that afterwards, but that's not what he's saying here.)

The idea that humans are not just the product of their environment but have something within them is undoubtedly true; some of our behaviours are learned (from the economy, and from other places), and some are innate/genetic.

Similarly, humans placed in a "favourable economic environment" are not automatically perfect, or even good.

On these points, I agree with him (in spite of being an atheist and ex-Catholic.)

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Due to the bit about redemption and that it was the Pope's words I considerably doubt he was speaking about anything other than original sin. If you find your genetics equatable to sin from which you need redemption, you should consider aiding gene therapy research or something then, because you cannot change your genes by reading the writings of religious leaders.

To talk about "redeeming" oneself is a standard English idiom. When the pope uses it, maybe he does mean something else, but I don't see why we need to interpret a long-ish, otherwise non-theological piece uncharitably over the use of a single word once.

> but I don't see why we need to interpret a long-ish, otherwise non-theological piece uncharitably over the use of a single word once.

Because the words are in the general sense and I'd like someone to show me why "man", as it was originally phrased, needs any kind of redemption.

Maybe we don't need a tailbone or some troublesome cancer causing genes, but fixing bad genes isn't redemption. It's a judgement-free mechanical fix for a machine, a biological equivalent to the flipping of bits in programming code. I'm not redeeming my code by making it more optimal when I fix a bug. So why would changing our genes be redemption?

Do you not think that there is clearly something wrong with humanity. A quick glance around the world shows that we are positively evil to each other. I think we are also good, but there is immense suffering in the world. You can be an atheist and think that there is something wrong with human beings. Non Christian folk for millennia have a rich tradition of seeing something wrong with human beings:

Oh, the torment bred in the race,

the grinding scream of death

and the stroke that hits the vein,

the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,

the curse no man can bear.

- Aeschylus, from The Libation Bearers

There are differences between the understanding of redemption in the Catholic and Orthodox churches; I can speak only for the Orthodox part, and hopefully I won't mangle it somehow. :) I've tried to compress this as much as possible without being confusing.

The goal of humanity is not simply to end up in Heaven, to reach some sort of place. It is not even necessarily the case that we are trying to restore ourselves to the state that Adam and Eve had -- for even they made a mistake at that time, a mistake serious enough to have cosmic ramifications.

So what was the problem? Well we do know of Adam and Eve being cast from Paradise after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But it's not the eating of the apple that begins the story. Rather, it was Adam's reaction to God. When God confronted Adam, Adam did not respond by saying, "Yes, I ate of the tree against Your warning. I'm sorry; please forgive me." He said instead, "The woman which You gave me, she made me eat it." Instead of being accountable for his action, for his own free will, Adam blames not only Eve but his Creator, essentially renouncing his free will. It was this act, that of failing to accept responsibility and instead casting down his neighbor, that led to humanity being cast out from Paradise -- or rather, casting itself out. Adam's action had effects throughout the cosmos, sending everything into disorder and brokenness and death.

So we see that the problem we have is that humans are cruel to one another and to God (and to creation, also). And this cannot be rectified in a way like having a bone fixed or some code swapped, for the problem is inextricably tied up in humanity's free will. So God chose to rectify this in a way that demonstrated not only His divinity, but _perfect humanity_. Christ becomes incarnate in the flesh and demonstrates, Himself, not only what it is to be truly human but that glory which all humanity is intended to receive. St. Athanasius describes this succinctly as: "God became man so that man might become God." This concept is termed theosis.

Theosis is realized in love of God and one's neighbor, actualized through humility. Unlike Adam blaming Eve, Christ, the new Adam, blames Himself. Christ takes up and covers the sin of the world, even on the Cross praying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Christ accounts _only Himself_ as deserving of death, and all as worthy of eternal life. And in this perfect love, even death has no power over Him. Hades (a place of gloom where the dead were consigned; a jail in a sense -- not Hell) cannot contain Him and is destroyed, and those who were bound there by Adam's sin are released. "Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." It through these actions that all of creation was redeemed.

Yes, that was "redemption" in the past tense. From the Orthodox perspective, redemption has already occurred because Christ has not only rectified the division between God and man, He has given us the tools to experience divine life even now, through humble love of God and neighbor. Christ has given us the perfect example of how to live, He has destroyed death, and through Christ's union with humanity in the Incarnation, descent into Hades, Resurrection, and Ascention, paved the way to become by grace that which God is by nature.

"The powerlessness of Christ has always threatened the powerfulness of the world. And the silence of the cross is the most eloquent sermon about the power of love. Despite what we know in ourselves and whatever we see in our world, the cross proclaims what love can and will achieve. The scandal of the cross is that, in spite of our wrongs and the wrongdoings of our world, God loves us to the point of death." --Fr John Chryssavgis, Light Through Darkness: the Orthodox Tradition

Christian theology on Original Sin[1] varies widely, perhaps more widely than you are aware.

The commonly accepted view in the Catholic West (as opposed to the Catholic/Orthodox East or the Protestant West) is that Original Sin is the privation of sanctifying grace[2] in consequence of the sin of Adam.

In other words, it's not an inherited genetic disturbance; rather, at the moment you were conceived you were lacking in a spiritual quality which God did not gift to you in view of the disobedience of the first parents of the human race.

In any case, this could quickly get far afield from the bounds of an HN-ish discussion, but I did want you to be conscious of the fact that your notion of Original Sin may be unnecessarily limited to what amounts to a caricature.

[1] http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Original_Sin

[2] http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Grace#II._SANCTIFYIN...

Apologies for contributing to this going even further afield of the bounds of HN-ish discussion, but I can't help but point out the relevance of one of the big points from the Council of Trent. The Church argued in favor of the idea that original sin is passed on through "propagation, not imitation." [1] That is, original sin is passed on from generation to generation rather like a disease, instead of from children simply imitating their parents.

But although this "disease model" of sin can sometimes be a useful theological model, as you say, it is most emphatically not a genetic disturbance or a true disease in the medical sense of the word.

[1] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2...

First of all, the Christian theological vision of redemption incorporates a much broader view of humanity than one individual's salvation from damnation, it shares much in common with the Marxist view of the end of history in that it also puts hope on a stable everlasting peace and prosperity, where the "lion will lay down with the lamb".

I'm not advocating for Christian theology at all, but it would be foolish not to see the Universalist connections between Marxism and Christianity, they both have a vision for the "end of history".

So even if the Pope weren't engaging Marx on his own terms here, speaking plainly of a Materialist redemption, which it appears he is doing, his Christian theology would presuppose a good deal of shared understanding in Marx's hope for Utopia. The Church has a love-hate relationship with Communism that needs to be understood before their analysis of it can be cast by the wayside so easily.

>because you cannot change your genes by reading the writings of religious leaders.

Well, you most certainly can change your mind by reading writings, and that is the most important aspect of every human being, worth investigating further .. at all costs.

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