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Christianity as mother of western liberalism : Comments
By Peter Sellick, published 6/10/2015Siedentop gives us an accessible journey through the transformations of the self from the preclassical Western family, through ancient Greece and Rome and the rise of the church in Europe to the sixteenth century.
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I wrote (page 4 of this thread) :
« While the church fully recognizes the possibility of free will and individual responsibility, at the same time, it actively promotes the image of a Christ shepherding his faithful flock of docile sheep all along that Gaussian lifeline, leaving no room whatsoever for the expression of any form of individuality. »
The implication is that sheep-like behaviour is righteous and independent behaviour is sinful.
This is epitomised by the Abrahamic religions’ creation myth of Adam and Eve disobeying God and eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Their act of independence was deemed to be sinful.
And it was on the foundation of this myth that Irenaeus, the 2nd century Bishop of Lyon in France, built the Christian doctrine of “original sin” of which Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine) became an ardent advocate during the 4th century.
Wikipedia:
« Augustine of Hippo (354–430) taught that Adam's sin is transmitted by concupiscence, or "hurtful desire", resulting in humanity becoming a massa damnata (mass of perdition, condemned crowd), with much enfeebled, though not destroyed, freedom of will. When Adam sinned, human nature was thenceforth transformed. Adam and Eve, via sexual reproduction, recreated human nature. Their descendants now live in sin, in the form of concupiscence, a term Augustine used in a metaphysical, not a psychological sense.
Augustine insisted that concupiscence was not a being but a bad quality, the privation of good or a wound. He admitted that sexual concupiscence (libido) might have been present in the perfect human nature in paradise, and that only later it became disobedient to human will as a result of the first couple's disobedience to God's will in the original sin. In Augustine's view (termed "Realism"), all of humanity was really present in Adam when he sinned, and therefore all have sinned ... As sinners, humans are utterly depraved in nature, lack the freedom to do good, and cannot respond to the will of God without divine grace. »
Not much room for the "individual" in that Christian doctrine !
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