A friend of mine posted the following on facebook:
It says in Romans 5:12-21 that basicly we’re born into sin because we all existed in seed form in Adam when Adam sinned. So therefore anyone born through Adam is born into Sin.
Before I read this post, I was well aware that this (rather silly) understanding of the doctrine of original sin was believed by a great many people hundreds of years ago, but I had no idea this was still taught in any church nowadays! The doctrine of original sin is at the center of most forms of Christianity, but how the doctrine is understood has varied greatly across time and space. The version of original sin theory that this guy believes in is really old and outdated, having to do with marriage of preformation (the idea that inside every man are sperm that have teeny weeny little people inside them, which have their own teeny weeny little sperm with every teeny-weenier people inside of them, and so on) an idea which we know has historically been linked to the doctrine of original sin.
I don’t think most Christians, at least not the ones who got a decent high school education, buy this stuff anymore, opting instead for more sophisticated versions of original sin theory whereby Adam is a literary Everyman who represents the flaws of the whole human race and whatnot. Still, I was pretty surprised to find this out there. It just goes to show what people are capable of believing.
On a related, I also had a friend on facebook try and convince me of the truth of the bible because snakes develop legs as embryos which they later reabsorb. His reasoning was that in Genesis, God had punished the snake by cursing him to crawl on the ground (which implies that prior to this the snake didn’t crawl on the ground, which means he might’ve had legs). So, the fact that snakes develop legs as embryos is proof of Genesis. “Not so fast, buster,” I thought, and I pointed out that there is another theory that says snakes were once legged. I even pointed out that if he were right, we’d never ever find a fossil snake with legs, since according to his literal interpretation of the Bible the only snake who ever had legs was that first original snake, and he lost that pair of legs before he died. On the other hand, if evolution is right then we could find such fossils, since there have been tons of intermediates between snakes and ancient reptiles, and at least a couple of those guys might have turned into fossils. As turns out, we do have fossil snakes with legs, a decisive refutation of the literal-Genesis theory, but that just wasn’t enough to convince the poor fellow I was talking to. On the one hand, I hate sounding arrogant or mocking, but on the other hand, it is just so funny what some people can believe!
