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on original sin:
the most fleshed out attempt to explain original sin is in augustine's city of god. the argument comes down to this:because you are human and descended from adam and eve, you have a kind of sin chip built into your circuitry. that chip means that you, as a human being, are completely, hopelessly fucked. augustine seems to have some fun outlining just how fucked you are and how much it is a function of a divine justice blah blah blah, so he can talk with great wonderment about how jesus took care of all that. the logic seems to work off itself. i dont think the "logic" of original sin gets addressed anywhere in the main texts--it doesnt make sense, and kind of makes the god in question into something of a tyrant, so its better just to believe. a shut up and swallow kind of thing.
one the gospels: what you read are the gospels selected by the council of nicea in the early 4th century--once constantine converted, and began assimilating christianity to the roman state bureacuracy, tweaks were required to make christianity more hierarchical--it was functional to assume that divine inspiration effectively stopped at a certain, arbitrary point in the past and that gospels stopped being produced that were "real" (some gnostics were still producing gospels, you see) because if divine inspiration was still racing about in 328 or something there would be nothing for the church to mediate....
it was functional to prefer stories about jesus, who seems to have been the main character in what amounts to a minor short fiction industry, that came from a more neoplatonist viewpoint than from other perspectives (for example) because this seemed symmetrical with a bureacratic church.
since it is kind of risky to do this and leave much in the way of traces lying about, the rejected gospels were in the main destroyed (including the gospel of thomas, the story of the teenage jesus, thunder pefect kind and other gnostic texts--they survived in some copies, you can read them in editions like the one elaine pagels put together)....
there are two things that surface even through this readers digest condensed milk version of the council of nicea story:
the gospels you read are as they are not because of any particular accuracy, but because of they were older when the council met, and this alone fit with the idea that divine inspiration had somehow stopped. so you need a church, you see. and because the viewpoint built into the texts were hierarchical or justified hierarchy at some level-----so you can have this kind of church.
second the gospels were not written with reference to empirical acuracy, nor would that have been required: instead, they seems to have been generated with reference to each other, mixed with a kind of divine "inspiration"--so you get a kind of hall of mirrors, something like the french hardboiled detective fiction series le poulpe (the squid) in which lots of different writers make scenarios that conform to certain rules that involve the main character, exploring different aspects of his or her character, etc.
how you resolve your relation to this hall of mirrors around the question of faith is your perogative--i figure there is a way to do it such that the fragments will organize into a three-dimensional image (maybe you need special glasses)---but i am no more or less interested in the stories of jesus than i am in stoires or metastories outlined in any number of other novels.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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