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Cogito ergo sum

Here in the Philosophy forum we will talk about all the "why" questions. We'll have conversations about the way in which philosophy and theology and religion interact with each other. Metaphysics, ontology, origins, truth? They're all fair game so jump right in and have some fun! But remember...play nice!

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Original sin

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  • Originally posted by seer View Post
    Original sin: The tendency to evil supposedly innate in all human beings, held to be inherited from Adam in consequence of the Fall.

    Here I'm not focusing on the why of original sin, how we got here, but the fact of original sin (or evil). That we all do evil. And it's not that we merely do evil by mistake, but that we do wrong even when we agree with ourselves that the act is wrong. We, as humans, have all experienced this: I know A is wrong, I agree that A is wrong, yet I do it anyway. The morally rational is superseded or rejected - and we choose the wrong. But why, what is driving these bad choices, if we agree and know A is wrong, what compels us to go against our best moral sense? If we say selfishness or lust then the question becomes - how/why do these so often rise to ascendancy? What makes us forgo the rational in these moral situations?
    I agree with the early Augustine that we have a propensity to sin and a necessity to die. It's the propensity of the inclinations that influences our sinful behavior. But nothing compels us. We're just influenced and the will freely chooses to go wrong. This would be in line with my soft libertarianism.
    Many and painful are the researches sometimes necessary to be made, for settling points of [this] kind. Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject.
    George Horne

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