Sin

Posted on September 14, 2003 in Adolescence Book of Days Evolution & Creation Morals & Ethics

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about someone who sinned.

There are no sins worth recounting save our own and I believe that only a few people deserve to know them.

I went to Catholic schools until I was in fifth grade when I transferred to public schools. Sin was big on my mind and it took a long time — until my early forties — to cease believing in a God who punished us in the moment for the evil that we did.

I covered my eyes when my friend Dana showed me Playboy centerfolds. That was a sin — the nuns told me so. They pounded this image of public school kids as being wholly depraved and degenerate. When I got there, I found that though we didn’t say prayers, public school kids were pretty much like Catholic school kids except there weren’t nearly as many opportunities for hypocrisy.

There were more fights in public school, but just as much name-calling. It wasn’t until I was in seventh grade that I became aware of my first Fundamentalists. They were few in number then and they tried to reach us by distributing comic books about the theory of evolution. Even at that age I recognized their half-truthes and bullshit. Maybe then I began to question my belief.

I read up on the theory of evolution, studied every point, began to learn what made science tick. I remember coming home and telling my parents what I was doing. My mother thought that it was heresy for Catholics to believe in evolution. She looked at my father. He told her no. The discussion went on without me into the night. I first heard the name of Teilhard de Chardin as they talked. No one in my family ever pressed me to avoid studying evolution again.

The Baptists and the Nazarenes screamed that to believe in evolution was a sin. How could they say that? They beat the black book, quoted from it, and defied me — the Catholic — to do the same. I couldn’t. I was too young and ignorant to defend myself. It struck me as completely odd that people would be so upset by the theory. I guess they went to zoos and saw the monkies scratching their bare bottoms. When they came home, they felt for a tail. No tail? Then we’re not monkies, they reasoned. It’s a lie, it’s all a big lie.

I grew to dislike the tricks they played in order to win the game of “Truth”, how they would dispute studies without filling in people on the entirety of the facts. They claimed that paleontologists had reconstructed a man based on a single tooth, that a living mollusk subjected to Carbon 14 testing was taken to be tens of thousands of years old. Of course, they didn’t mention the fact that the mollusk’s shell was made of lime, the ancient shells of other mollusks. They avoided talking about other discoveries.. They played trick after trick to avoid the truth which was that humankind is no better than any other life on this planet, that the world wasn’t made for us.

Theravada Buddhists like to tell the tale of the god Brahma. When everything came to be because of the natural laws of the universe, Brahma awoke for the first time and looked around. He saw continents forming, mountains rising, oceans filling, fish climbing out of the sea and becoming creatures of land, etc. Since he was the first consciousness and there was no other to dispute him, he smiled to himself. This is all because of me, he thought falsely, and when people came to be, he told them that he created the world.

Whoever wrote the Bible, I think, just didn’t have a clue about how the world came to be. Like Brahma, they opened their eyes and looked around. Because they knew that they couldn’t make mountains rise, fill the oceans, they made a creator god in their image who worked the earth with his hands, shaped the mountains, invented animals and plants. And then they had the Creator God said “All this was made for you. The mastery of the world is yours.”

Theravada Buddhism, Jainism, and Science all teach that this isn’t so. We are but a part of the cosmos. They gained this knowledge by observation and self-critique, searching the heart for evidence of prejudices that could distort their take on the truth.

What I have never liked about Creationists is that in order to believe in their version of the origins of life, I must lie. I must tell myself that the world is only 8000 years old, that the fossils in the rocks are fakes, that we can know the entire truth. I cannot do this: it is a lie and to lie is to sin.

I do too much else to take on the additional shame of telling untruths about my place in the world. I will not be led into falsehood by the Religious Right.

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