I wonder from time to time if I’m the only person who finds the entire idea of Original Sin demented, an unusually putrid idea that only somebody who is already messed-up could possibly think makes sense.
You might be confused here, thinking the original sin was not lust but disobeying God by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Same thing, said Saint Augustine (around 400 AD). The whole convoluted nonsense about “original sin” is traceable to him. Because he was tortured by his idea that the lust he himself experienced was a dirty sin that kept him from true communion with God. And, as Augustine’s legacy, Christians to this day torture themselves over this.
This attitude is itself a kind of sexual perversion. It loads ordinary, natural sex acts with a meaning and significance that make no sense. And, by the way, if humans were made in God’s image, does She feel lust? How does she handle it?
Augustine set out the doctrine of Original Sin in his letters to the Pelagians, which is a story in itself. There was a British monk named Palagius who, taking his cue from Augustine’s writings on free will, reasoned that if the will is free then the will must also be perfectible.
That cut out the need for Jesus and Holy Men and Sunday School; Do-it-yourself Salvation!
Y’all can imagine how that went over. Augustine wrote two letters to the Pelagians setting-out the futility of such an idea thanks to Adam’s Original Sin. And ever since, Christianity has insisted upon degrading people with the claim that they’re no damn good, were born no damn good, can never be any damn good, and can escape the eternity of punishment they deserve in consequence of being human only by joining the The Club.
It’s absolutely mad. I listen to these clowns some days and positively marvel that there is a streetlight in the entire land without some idiot preacher hanging from it.