Original Sin Quotes

“The notion of a sexualized Jesus may make modern worshippers cringe, but the most prominent early Church fathers did not shrink from the concept. They embraced it fully and made it the basis of many of their writings. For example, Origen, head of the catechetical school in Alexandria, wrote a commentary on Song of Songs. In the introduction to this work he discusses the Christian transformation of sexual desire from that of a man for a woman—or harlot—to that of a man for Jesus. Origen makes it clear that Jesus takes the place of the woman in an explicitly sexual context. The shift from “lust” to “love of Jesus” takes place at the age of sexual maturation, under the guidance of the Church: “For everyone who comes to what they call the age of puberty loves something, whether less than rightly when he loves what he should not [which Origen has previously said is a woman or harlot], or rightly and beneficially when he loves what he should [which is Jesus, as sexual love],” writes Origen in his Commentary on the Song of Songs.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“After Cassian died, the Church declared him a martyr. Christians like Prudentius, whose short work on the death of Cassian is one of our only surviving accounts, venerated him as one of the many Christian saints who suffered the wrath of pagans for the sake of his faith. However, his death at the hands of such young, distressed children leaves students of history with several compelling questions.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“The Catholic Church has remained very much the same for two thousand years. The problem of child rape may never be rooted out of the Church, because it is integral to the very foundations of Christianity.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“Tertullian wrote in Apologeticus about the belief that Christians possessed a fiery breath that was able to send demons out of the bodies of the possessed; he says that demons flee the touch of Christians or their breath. This fits the historical context well when we consider that Cyril of Jerusalem, one of the greatest advocates of ritual sodomy, wrote in Procatachesis and Mystagogical Catechesis about the process of breathing or blowing upon young, nude, oiled boys: “Be earnest in submitting to the exorcisms. If you are blown upon and exorcised, the process brings you to salvation.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“In may be hard for a modern audience to understand, but in the early centuries of the Common Era, salvation was no joke. Original Sin was a doctrine that non-Christians ignored—and even mocked—but exorcist priests took it very seriously and were specially trained to root it out.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“According to our ancient catechetical sources, if you were a Christian priest living in the earliest era of the Church, you knew what had to be done. Nothing was more merciful in the long run. Remove the masses of unfortunate, orphaned children from the streets, a few at a time, and prepare them for salvation; starve them, recite numerous creeds to them with a steady, droning, persistent repetition, and then gather them together into the secret chamber, a place that only priests were allowed to frequent. A place where the devil could be summoned; a place where a priest could forever purge them of their desire for sexual intimacy.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“Early Christian priests altered perceptions of sexuality in Roman culture by employing child rape as a means of reinforcing indoctrination. Ancient child abuse within the Church was not the product of a few rogue pedophile priests; it was a deliberate, purposeful act, meant to change Roman perspectives on sexual intercourse and religion. The Christian hierarchy used the sexual assault of minors as a means of transforming a society steeped in the veneration of female sexual allure and feminine spiritual and political authority. The Christian war on classical values redefined morality and enabled priests to use extremely brutal mechanisms for changing the way people thought about sex.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“Priests manipulated prevailing sexual mores when they forced young converts to renounce the pleasures of male-female intercourse. The ritual was detailed, brutal, and consistent. Child rape was an institutional policy that embraced both Catholic theology and the Christian drive to transform the cultural makeup of the Roman Empire.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“For Ambrose and the Christians of his generation, women were considered to be lower than slaves—something Ambrose claimed—and sexual intercourse with women was believed to be a contaminating process ultimately devised by the devil. Therefore, the prospect of sex with a virginal, sexually hermaphroditic boy was not only in step with the hugely popular cults of Cybele and Dionysus, but in a Christian theological sense it was perfectly pure and spiritually justifiable. In fact, the proposition of sex with the Jesus lady-boy also supported the assertions of generations of monks, priests and Church fathers who upheld the idea that a virginal, sexually undifferentiated, prepubertal child was the ideal sexual partner.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“A description of a man-god savior with female reproductive organs and breasts may be disturbing to a modern audience, but the pagan world, which at the time was still a large percentage of the population, would have quickly recognized their own hermaphroditic, nurturing divinities in the person of Jesus the virginal lady-boy.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“In the first book of On Virgins, St. Ambrose spoke of a scriptural and prophetic, virginal Jesus, who had fully functional breasts and made himself the once-male, feminized partner of every believer. In this virgin allegory, St. Ambrose goes so far as to say that Jesus produces believers from his masculine womb, and feeds them with the milk of his breasts. In Ambrose’s words, Jesus was the masculine “rock” that developed nourishing breasts in order to facilitate his role as the breast-feeding mother of the Church. In fact, Ambrose carries the point acerbically by ending his description of the feminized Jesus by claiming that it is perfectly natural that the son of god has his own teats.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

“Women’s Benevolence Before Christian monks began teaching that women were cursed, the Greco-Roman world worshipped the benevolent power of the feminine voice. The Greeks and Romans taught that women were politically relevant; they believed that women possessed a unique, divinely inspired ability to create beauty. They believed the cosmos had endowed women with gifts that were entirely absent in their male counterparts. The pre-Christian Mediterranean world believed the feminine voice was uniquely powerful—they believed it was a reflection of the highest creative force of the universe. In the pagan mind, the creator was not a man, but a child-nourishing woman.”
― David C.A. Hillman, Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church