According to Romans 3:23, ‘we are all sinners’. I am not a religious person, as you may have gathered, but I do admit to having done a few things that could be regarded as sinful during my lifetime. I mean, I once stole an LP from Boots the Chemist in around 1973 (it was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) and I still feel bad about that. But according to Psalm 58:3 ‘all people inherit a sin nature because of Adam’s sin in The Garden of Eden. Apparently, Adam ate from ‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’, although it was never made clear the specific type of fruit he consumed. Some have speculated it may have been figs, grapes or pomegranate. Christ – I’ve committed even more sins than I first realised.
In order to go to Heaven, I read that it is simply not good enough to be a good person. We need the saving grace of Jesus, whatever the fuck that means, in order to go there. As I do not believe in this existence of Jesus, unless he was a small-time conjuror touring the middle east, carrying out magic tricks a la Paul Daniels: “For my next trick, I’m going to change water to wine. You’ll like this. Not a lot.” Frankly, in the unlikely event that God does exist – spoiler alert: he doesn’t – I do not want to spend the rest of my life grovelling to Him in order to reserve a space in Heaven, where presumably I’d have to spend forever sucking up to Him in order to stay there.
On a more serious point, I deeply resent it when Godwhackers suggest that we are all sinners. I think it’s pure gobbledegook and I do wonder if one reason people engage in it is because of what is known as Pascal’s Wager, which essentially says that it’s best to believe in God just in case He does exist. To quote from Google AI: “(The idea) is to wager on belief to gain an infinite reward and avoid infinite punishment. Even if God doesn’t exist, the losses from belief are finite and thus less significant than the potential eternal loss from disbelief.” Even I can see a flaw here.
God doesn’t just have you under constant surveillance, he knows what you are thinking, too. What if I was to come to the irrational conclusion that there was an afterlife and then fancied living forever? Just apologising for my sins, whatever they were, wouldn’t be enough because God would know I was trying it on. In other words, I couldn’t just pretend. I’d have to mean it. I’m fucking doomed and what’s more I don’t care.
As for this Garden of Eden malarkey, where was it? No one seems to know for sure, although some say it was in or around Iraq. I suppose we could carry out an in-depth search, although I would warn you in advance that as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were never found, the odds of finding this famous garden would seem to be extremely long. Perhaps, Noah’s Ark might turn up at the same time, who knows? (It won’t.)
I don’t need some celestial dictator to tell me whether I have been good or bad. And I do not need to suck up to Him just because Adam and Even snaffled one too many figs and became sinners. Compare to some folk – how about Peter Sutcliffe, Gary Glitter and Harold Shipman? – I’m almost an angel, although I am aware that angels don’t exist, either.
