Or maybe you don't know. Maybe you are one of those folks for whom religious symbols or biblical terms are so archaic as to be incomprehensible. Fair enough. No point in discussing original sin if you don't know the first thing about it.
A quick synopsis. Before things went haywire, before people were casually unkind and intentionally evil.......when everything was well, and good, and beautiful and life-giving.......there was no sin. We are fairly sure that there must have been a time when things weren't as bad as they are today. (Although I do not mean 'the good old days' which may be fondly remembered by the geriatric crowd but which, in fact, were just as broken and dangerous as today but with uglier fashions)
Furthermore, when I use the highly charged religious term 'sin' I want you to think 'broken' 'forsaken' 'warped' 'skewed'. Let's use the word 'sin' to talk about the distortion of our shared life that causes pain and sorrow - too often deliberately, but often unintentionally or unavoidably.
People of every nation and culture have pondered about the possibility of a paradise - a time and place where everyone simply got along with everyone else, kindness and compassion prevailed, life was truly good. The great storytellers of each of these cultures have woven tales of what it was like when it was wonderful; Christians (and others) call this paradise Eden and it was a garden where animals cooperated, the vegetation was lush and suitable for eating, and the people were so sympatico that it was as if they came from one whole cloth.
But since we know that the world we inherited is not any version of paradise, how did we get from those wonderful imaginings to the mess we have today? Somehow, it all broke and became so shattered that all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put it back together again. What started this cascade of disaster?
Well, there are lots of stories about that as well. For Christians, this is where Adam and Eve come into play. They are the original human creatures, and on one hot afternoon (I made that up) when they were walking through the magnificent garden God had created and given to them as home, they encountered a tree called 'The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil". (Remember, this is a story, not a travel guide). It seemed like a good thing to be able to know good from evil, and the fruit of the tree was very appealing. So they ate.
Here's the rub. God had given them only one thing to remember in their garden, and you can guess what it was: stay away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. One thing! They took the first bite of that 'apple' and the rest is human history. God called out Adam, Adam threw Eve under the bus, and Eve blamed the wily serpent. With finger pointing all around, Paradise ended. Adam and Eve were evicted, they began to know the pain that comes from power-over relationships and the act of creation. They lost their close connection with the Creator, and work became a four letter word. The essential relationship between Creator and Beloved Creature is forever broken. We know it as sin.
From a single act comes generations of broken relationships. It is a pestilence upon the human race perpetrated by the human race. It is from these dreams of paradise, and stories about a desire that led folks astray, to the reality of our broken world that we get the idea (and, in the Church, doctrine) of 'original sin.'
So to bring us full circle, once again I assert, few of us are original in our sin, nor can we point to our very first 'original sin.' We ask Who is to blame? Is there a way to fix it? How did sex get involved? Keep an eye out for more sin talk.
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