John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
Sure, but Aquinas is writing about the distinction between Christ's conception and ours, that's all. He is alleging original sin is passed through the male line, since he see the male role as being the active one in reproduction, - a rather quaint notion to us nowadays but there we are.
It does not imply it is the act of sex that is itself sinful, or anything like that. After all, God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and fill the Earth. So sex was divinely ordained before the Fall.
. . . The doctrine of original sin is a whole other thread, at least. The ideas intended in this thread take the fact that the original sin is part and parcel of how that sin is transferred for granted; and that death is a result of sex, and sex is how that death is transferred.
Professor William Clark, who is an atheist and a Phd biologist, shows, in the book in the crosshairs of this thread, that science now knows that "programmed death" (in contradistinction to accidental death) is a result of organisms experimenting with, and adopting, sex, as a means of propagation:
The very first life forms, as we have seen, were not animals in the ordinary sense of the word, but free-living individual cells we now call bacteria. The entire being in this case consists of just a single cell. Yet by any biological criterion that would define us as alive, so were they. The earliest of these organisms represented then, as now, the simplest possible structure for carrying out the cardinal functions of all living things: the reproduction of their own kind through replication of their DNA, and the transmission of that DNA to offspring.
But it is less obvious that the earliest forms of these single-cell organisms shared then, or share now, the second cardinal feature of life as we know it----obligatory, programmed death. We, like virtually all other multicellular animals, must die, and there are many mechanisms built into us to be sure that we do. . . Many single-celled organisms may die, as the result of accident or starvation; in fact the vast majority do. But there is nothing programmed into them that says they must die. Death did not appear simultaneously with life. This is one of the most important and profound statements in all of biology. At the very least it deserves repetitions: Death is not inextricably intertwined with the definition of life. . .
Obligatory death as a result of senescence – natural aging – may not have come into existence for more than a billion years after life first appeared. This form of programmed death seems to have arisen at about the same time that cells began experimenting with sex in connection with reproduction. It may have been the ultimate loss of innocence.
Sex & The Origins of Death, prologue xi, p. 54 (bold emphasis mine).
But it is less obvious that the earliest forms of these single-cell organisms shared then, or share now, the second cardinal feature of life as we know it----obligatory, programmed death. We, like virtually all other multicellular animals, must die, and there are many mechanisms built into us to be sure that we do. . . Many single-celled organisms may die, as the result of accident or starvation; in fact the vast majority do. But there is nothing programmed into them that says they must die. Death did not appear simultaneously with life. This is one of the most important and profound statements in all of biology. At the very least it deserves repetitions: Death is not inextricably intertwined with the definition of life. . .
Obligatory death as a result of senescence – natural aging – may not have come into existence for more than a billion years after life first appeared. This form of programmed death seems to have arisen at about the same time that cells began experimenting with sex in connection with reproduction. It may have been the ultimate loss of innocence.
Sex & The Origins of Death, prologue xi, p. 54 (bold emphasis mine).
John
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