Sin, Sacrifice, and Atonement

89:2.1The fear of chance and the dread of bad luck lit­er­ally drove man into the in­ven­tion of prim­i­tive re­li­gion as sup­posed in­sur­ance against these calami­ties. From magic and ghosts, re­li­gion evolved through spir­its and fe­tishes to taboos. Ev­ery prim­i­tive tribe had its tree of for­bid­den fruit, lit­er­ally the ap­ple but fig­u­ra­tively con­sist­ing of a thou­sand branches hang­ing heavy with all sorts of taboos. And the for­bid­den tree al­ways said, “Thou shalt not.”

89:2.2As the sav­age mind evolved to that point where it en­vis­aged both good and bad spir­its, and when the taboo re­ceived the solemn sanc­tion of evolv­ing re­li­gion, the stage was all set for the ap­pear­ance of the new con­cep­tion of sin. The idea of sin was uni­ver­sally es­tab­lished in the world be­fore re­vealed re­li­gion ever made its en­try. It was only by the con­cept of sin that nat­u­ral death be­came log­i­cal to the prim­i­tive mind. Sin was the trans­gres­sion of taboo, and death was the penalty of sin.

89:2.3Sin was rit­ual, not ra­tio­nal; an act, not a thought. And this en­tire con­cept of sin was fos­tered by the lin­ger­ing tra­di­tions of Dil­mun and the days of a lit­tle par­a­dise on earth. The tra­di­tion of Adam and the Gar­den of Eden also lent sub­stance to the dream of a one­time “golden age” of the dawn of the races. And all this con­firmed the ideas later ex­pressed in the be­lief that man had his ori­gin in a spe­cial cre­ation, that he started his ca­reer in per­fec­tion, and that trans­gres­sion of the taboos—sin—brought him down to his later sorry plight.

89:2.4The ha­bit­ual vi­o­la­tion of a taboo be­came a vice; prim­i­tive law made vice a crime; re­li­gion made it a sin. Among the early tribes the vi­o­la­tion of a taboo was a com­bined crime and sin. Com­mu­nity calamity was al­ways re­garded as pun­ish­ment for tribal sin. To those who be­lieved that pros­per­ity and righ­teous­ness went to­gether, the ap­par­ent pros­per­ity of the wicked oc­ca­sioned so much worry that it was nec­es­sary to in­vent hells for the pun­ish­ment of taboo vi­o­la­tors; the num­bers of these places of fu­ture pun­ish­ment have var­ied from one to five.

89:2.5The idea of con­fes­sion and for­give­ness early ap­peared in prim­i­tive re­li­gion. Men would ask for­give­ness at a pub­lic meet­ing for sins they in­tended to com­mit the fol­low­ing week. Con­fes­sion was merely a rite of re­mis­sion, also a pub­lic no­ti­fi­ca­tion of de­file­ment, a rit­ual of cry­ing “un­clean, un­clean!” Then fol­lowed all the rit­u­al­is­tic schemes of pu­rifi­ca­tion. All an­cient peo­ples prac­ticed these mean­ing­less cer­e­monies. Many ap­par­ently hy­gienic cus­toms of the early tribes were largely cer­e­mo­nial.