Menninger spent the last half of his eyewitness account of the disappearance of sin (Chapter 3) on the displacement of \u201csin\u201d by \u201ccrime\u201d.\u00a0 He presented his own history of the convoluted process.<\/p>\n
Originally, \u201csin\u201d was not a \u201ccrime\u201d (a behavior to be punished by the state).\u00a0 There were good reasons for this.\u00a0 Parents, churches, communities and workplaces served as effective deterrents.<\/p>\n
For the family, one deterrent was parental intervention, as in \u201cspare the rod and spoil the child\u201d.<\/p>\n
(Native American Indians were shocked at the way the Puritans beat their children.\u00a0 Ironically, North American Indians were far closer to the Lebenswelt of the Paleolithic than the Lebenswelt of the Puritans.\u00a0 They were not ultra-civilized beings looking down at the barely civilized barbarians.\u00a0 They lived in a world where they did not know any different, until these Europeans arrived.\u00a0 They had no idea that Civilization was coming and what that meant.)<\/p>\n
For the churches, public confession and condemnations originally served as very effective deterrents against sin.\u00a0 The Celtic church changed that by developing a tradition of private confession.<\/p>\n
The community had other deterrents, such as citizen participation, police, courts and prisons.<\/p>\n
For the workplace, training in almost any discipline also served to deter sin.\u00a0 This \u201ctraining\u201d was not \u201cwhat you learn in college\u201d.\u00a0 This was \u201con the job training\u201d.\u00a0 Skinner called it \u201caversive conditioning\u201d.\u00a0 Practitioners called it \u201cgetting the job done\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Menninger spent the last half of his eyewitness account of the disappearance of sin (Chapter 3) on the displacement of \u201csin\u201d by \u201ccrime\u201d.\u00a0 He presented his own history of the convoluted process. Originally, \u201csin\u201d was not a \u201ccrime\u201d (a behavior to be punished by the state).\u00a0 There were good reasons for this.\u00a0 Parents, churches, communities […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-science-of-original-sin"],"yoast_head":"\n