Sex as Original Sin

Friend Xerxes interestingly simply assumes that the sin in the Garden of Eden was sex. He is not alone. As another friend of mine used to jape, “It wasn’t the apple on the tree; it was the pair on the ground.”

There is no textual warrant for this. Whatever “eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” might mean in literal terms, there is no reason to see sex there. One would presumably need to assume that the Bible follows a strict Victorian morality, insisting on speaking of sex only very obliquely.

This is anachronistic. The Victorians were historically quite unusual in their prudery. And, after all, Genesis has no trouble naming the act in Genesis 4.

More significantly, there is the obvious point that, for any Jew or Christian, there would have been nothing sinful about Adam and Eve having sex. Their union had been formally declared before God. What conceivable moral system would object?

I suspect that this nonsensical association of sex with the original sin is a Trojan horse—pun not intended― to justify general immorality. Precisely because Adam and Eve having sex would be perfectly innocent, the implication is that all sin is really okay.

Xerxes himself goes on, ominously, to assert that the existence of sin is entirely God’s fault. He complains of “sins that grandpa God set up in the first place.” Note the plural.

Then Mr. X objects to the notion that God would play favourites in war. God has no righteous reason, then, to fuss over whether Hitler won World War II, or the South won the US Civil War. He presumably would not or should not take sides, either, if some gang breaks into your home to rape and steal. Or he is just being a troublemaker.

One can perhaps see from this, in miniature, why we have rioting and looting in the streets in the US right now, and where this all came from. We can trace it back through the sexual revolution of the 1950s, to Freud’s application of Darwinism to the human soul.