Augustine's Confessions and Sin

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Augustine’s Confessions and Sin St. Augustine wrote many interesting things in his confessions. I personally thought that his writings of sin, and then the nature of good and evil are very interesting. Augustine struggled with sin his entire life and had to come to terms with it in his confessions. Also, while he talks of his sin and the nature of his sin he also talks of how things are inherently good, and that evil is just the reduction of good. St. Augustine shows that neither people, nor things are inherently evil, just that they can have effects that can be used for the wrong purposes. Sin was not unusual to Augustine, even as a young boy. In the second book, Augustine reveals that he and some of his friends stole some pears from a neighbor’s tree. They took the pears and threw them to the pigs. Augustine just got a thrill out of doing what was wrong. He said, “My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong”. This act of destruction seems to have a very adverse effect on Augustine’s psyche when he is older and in his confessions he spends a huge amount of time on this small insignificant event that to most people would just be something stupid he did as a child. Yet Augustine dwells on it and feels that since he sin came so easy to him, especially as a child, then people must be born with some inherent need to commit sin. When he talks about the original sin, he says that he used it as an excuse to sin, and that he would take great delight in it. This shows that he was not mentally strong enough at this point in his life to be able to take responsibility for his actions; instead he just blames God for them. He explains this by saying that the original sin of Eve makes people into the sinners that they are and how they naturally come by it. Later in his life, Augustine resorts to some
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