Born Bad: Original Sin And The Making Of The Western World

Being an American I think it is really important to realize the impact that religion (and primarily Christianity) has had on the morals our nation's people. I believe the most recent study on whether one needs God to lead an ethical life was proved to be around the 45% approval rating mark. Though this data would say that the slight majority of American’s are leaning more secular, there is still a large portion of Americans that do in fact hold the teaching of the Church and Scripture as their reference point for how they make their moral judgements. I also would like stress importance by highlighting that I have lived in a theological bubble. As much as I could point out a town very different from my own as being narrow-minded, I think a secular

In the podcast done with historian and and author of Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World, James Boyce, the topic of Adam’s “original sin” was the main point of focus. The story of Adam and Eve in Old Testament is the Christian creation story for how God created humans, and also that it was Adam’s original sin that banished Humanity to Earth from the Garden of Eden. I did not know this before listening to this podcast but in deeming Adam’s sin as being the sin that burdened all of humanity afterwards, then the Church could argue that everyone needed salvation. Boyce argues that the original sin paved the way for colonization, crusades, and missionary excursions; All actions justified because all people, even if they did not realized it, needed to accept God for it was the only way to reach heaven in the next life. This level of manipulation seems just ingenious to me but another facet of context that makes it a little more believable (as Boyce points out) was that there was a real appeal to the idea that our mortal life-- in a time in history of brutal and indiscriminate death-- is just a small portion of our soul’s existence: “The priority was the next life,” as stated by

Most of the checkboxes of what could qualify a person as approaching enlightenment are shared with that of the qualifications for a virtuous person under Virtue Ethics. In my life, even though I am not a buddhist, I can respect a person who exemplifies virtuous traits, and even I try to keep my virtues in check when I notice one drifting a bit too far to one extreme or another. But Virtue Ethics and cherished Buddhist traits are also only relevant because people live in close social contact with one another. If all people kept to themselves and never cooperated with one another virtues would be meaningless. So one can not talk about Virtue Ethics without including Social Contract theory’s context that give relevance to Virtue