Thought-provoking article today on youth crime. Touched a load of things for me that seemed to resonate with my experience of late of teens in the school I'm at currently in Tyneside. And I can't help thinking, again, of Jesus' words about it being better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone roundd your neck than to cause 'one of these little ones' to sin. Apart from anything else, it seems to me, this means we can't simply operate, morally, with a model that only recognises moral responsibility as the determinative factor in human behaviour and sinfulness. It plays, in fact, into my thesis that humanity is corporate as well as individual and that being formed by those around us is the vital transmissive route for the root of sin that we often call 'original'.
It's the statistics of sin. Like the statistics of existence: we know that it is overwhelming probability that gives us the regularities that many have called the laws of physics. So we can catch a glimpse of the strange possibility that original sin is the overwhelming probability of social formedness inscribing into each of us the basic data that will mean that one way or another, we will find that something we are given by the morally imperfect beings who nurture us (or to whom we look for nurture) interacts with the necessities of our being human; our finitude, our necessarily unique perspective on the world, our concern to avoid pain or to pursue pleasure ... whatever ... to produce thinking and actions which are, to put not too fine a point on it, sinful. And in turn we pass on the memetic virus. (Not that I hold with meme theory, but as a metaphor it has its uses).
In this we see the paradox that we are born both originally and basically good but that we are also bound to sin. Mimesis is the bootstrap that pulls us to learn and become members of our family and then our society. But we are bound to imitate also the sinful content of the messages we incorporate into our individuality. We are well familiar with the way that it runs from them; so much experience in self-examination and reflection on the ways of sin. Thus, from the article:
Any theory of atonement beyond this point in our cultural history will have to take account of this. That's why I recommend
Labour has failed to tackle the roots of youth disorder | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited
Technorati Tags: sin, social, corporate, corpowerations,
Those who would birch and flog the teenagers who go bad seem convinced that human action takes place in a vacuum. There is no excuse for murderous, bullying, thoughtless behaviour, but to ignore the circumstances that led to that behaviour is simply crass. Being poor will not in itself make you more likely to murder another person of your own age, but being poor, brutalised and unloved - or loved in a way that alternates neglect and indulgence - might.
It's the statistics of sin. Like the statistics of existence: we know that it is overwhelming probability that gives us the regularities that many have called the laws of physics. So we can catch a glimpse of the strange possibility that original sin is the overwhelming probability of social formedness inscribing into each of us the basic data that will mean that one way or another, we will find that something we are given by the morally imperfect beings who nurture us (or to whom we look for nurture) interacts with the necessities of our being human; our finitude, our necessarily unique perspective on the world, our concern to avoid pain or to pursue pleasure ... whatever ... to produce thinking and actions which are, to put not too fine a point on it, sinful. And in turn we pass on the memetic virus. (Not that I hold with meme theory, but as a metaphor it has its uses).
In this we see the paradox that we are born both originally and basically good but that we are also bound to sin. Mimesis is the bootstrap that pulls us to learn and become members of our family and then our society. But we are bound to imitate also the sinful content of the messages we incorporate into our individuality. We are well familiar with the way that it runs from them; so much experience in self-examination and reflection on the ways of sin. Thus, from the article:
gang members run with each other because the street is the one place where they can justify and pity themselves with impunity
Any theory of atonement beyond this point in our cultural history will have to take account of this. That's why I recommend
Labour has failed to tackle the roots of youth disorder | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited
Technorati Tags: sin, social, corporate, corpowerations,
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