Word: sin
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...head gangster Jimmy Murtha (Joe Pantoliano) as the kind of guy who mercilessly blows people up, then goes to confession and can't quite deliver the goods. "I know what you do. God knows what you do," the priest chastises. "You're trying to tell me that the only sin you have to confess is that you took the Lord's name in vain?" Murtha's response: "I'm giving you what I can." Then he negotiates his penance of 10 Hail Marys down to two: "Hey, that's all I can do." EZ Streets is filled with people...
John Paul stopped short of addressing a point on which Pius was emphatic: that a particular man named Adam must have been our ancestor. Any other theory, Pius maintained, was inconsistent with the doctrine of original sin. But the teaching about Adam has also been superseded, says Father Richard P. McBrien, a liberal theologian at the University of Notre Dame. "No Scripture scholar today would say we are literally descended from two people." To such scholars, and John Paul, the evolution of our bodies matters much less than the evolution of our souls...
Which brings us back to Eden. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge because they have pretensions of divinity. "Your eyes will be opened," the serpent promises, "and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Thus the original sin is often described as a kind of hubris--"the pride which sprang from [our] likeness to God," as one scholar put it. By the lights of evolutionary psychology, an essential human weakness is indeed a tendency to be seduced by our seemingly godlike rationality into thinking we can readily know good and evil; our downfall...
Still, to prevail comprehensively--to frustrate all or even most of the subtle selfishness built into us--takes massive, ongoing effort and painful self-knowledge. The difficulty of the exercise lends a kind of credence to what some Christians see as the upshot of their doctrine of original sin: that people are born in need of a salvation gained through repentance. To put it in secular terms: so deeply hidden from natural introspection is our badness that moral reform requires a solid jolt of enlightenment, sharp and persistent awareness of our inherent baseness...
...receive a coating of evil. But according to Darwinism, the evil in nature lies at its very roots, instilled by its creator, natural selection. After all, natural selection is chronic competition untrammeled by moral rules. Heedless selfishness and wanton predation are traits likely to endure. If these things are sins, then the roots of sin lie at the origin--not just of humankind but of life...