Compare: a pharmaceutical company tells us that we are all born with a disease that requires that we buy their product all our lives long, and that if we do it will cure us after death.
Christopher Hitchens paraphrased or supplemented this by saying:
God creates us sick and then offers a cure under penalty of eternal torture.
Does anyone have a good counter-argument? By 'good', I mean something that actually makes sense, and not a silly quotation from C S Lewis or some other patronising preacher.
I would be genuinely interested in hearing a real, well-reasoned explanation about what is good in Christianity's guilt-ridden philosophy of 'original sin'.
As both of those fine men have pointed out, Christian teaching seems not to be the nice friendly teaching of Jesus that many people expect - love thy neighbour and all that - but a set of stories that are cunningly crafted to terrify believers into submission. Where is the objective morality that we should all aspire to follow in that message?
It seems to me that the concept of original sin is simply a doctrine of cruelty, thinly disguised as a 'truth', based on obvious mythology and mysteriously inherited by each new generation. This is in spite of the bible's other teachings that the sins of the fathers shall (only) be visited on the next four or five generations.
Its obvious! It has been carefully tailored with the aim of subjugation.
The sad thing is that it works on so many innocent people.
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