That Original Sin

I am no expert on the theological claim as to the actuality and origin of the assertion that humans suffer from original sin. I believe we do, but I do not think that we sinned willfully so much as our natural depravity is a biological condition of our natures (We were born nasty, and must act nasty because we mostly cannot act any other way, so therefore we are blameless for those wicked acts. To the degree that we are free willing, as we choose to sin, then sinning is our fault, with divine consequences imposed.) and would be the original sin afflicting any other species of sentient animal that would evolve up out of the animal kingdom as humans have done and are doing. Allegorically, Adam and Eve, disobeyed Yahweh and ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of life with its knowledge of good and evil, so they were the original sinners cast out of Eden, and our souls, generation after generation, are stained with sin due to this primordial sin committed by our Founders. Adam and Eve, in a state of pure goodness and bliss in the Garden of Eden, were somehow carboard characters, not free, not alive, just wholesome robots like the elves of Rivendell. When they disobeyed God, that is a sin and that is the original sin. I believe that God wants our obedience, but as free willing thinkers and feelers and sinners, alive and logical and questioning. Intelligent, principled obedience chosen as the wise way to live by alert, logical, principled, devout religious believers is what God seeks from us as individuators serving God's cause. It might be that there are two original sins, and they have never before been identified and bracketed apart from each other, so the confusion resulting creates a hopeless muddle. The first original sin is the one that I referred to above. It is natural human depravity, a powerful desire to sin, hate and destroy. That propensity to do evil is largely involuntary, but it will be voluntary once we are alert enough to understand moral alternatives, and still militantly choose to do wrong in defiance of God, our own well-being and in rebellion against Being itself. The second original sin is the act of disobeying God. The presupposition that applies here is that the disobedience is conducted by a sinning, free, alert, awakened moral being, knowing right from wrong, knowing that God is watching, knowing that consequences will follow, but still is determined to sin, and acts upon that willed desire. Going back to the Fall from grace: Adam and Eve are sinful when they freely choose to disobey God. They are innocent or morally neutral not required to be blamed or condemned for their actions. They were innocent, purely good angels when living as sleepy robots in Eden as part of God's team of purely good followers. Once they became awake and free and sinned, they completed the second original sin. Once they freely chose, God unlocked their true or transformed depraved natures, previously completed suppressed or sublimated by God's powerful, ruling natural law and instinctual rules guiding beasts that are rationally asleep. This transformed, basic human nature, depraved, lawless, poltroonish, rude, barbaric, selfish, mendacious, rebellious, vicious and violent, was the first type of original sin that governs the moral destiny of all humans unto the last day. This curse from God is also, ironically, human's greatest blessing. The Fall from Grace (God's grace that humans could take no credit for generating or sustaining.) can be the Reemergence From Natural and Earned Disgrace into a personal and societal state of Divine Grace on Earth as God and humans work to keep the land and people good and holy. God the Mother and the Father are logical Individuators, so they request and demand that we use our reason and our sentiment, more guided by our reason than our feelings, to individual-live and create and love God, oneself and others in one's family, one's community and one's nation. Now, let me digress for a minute and quote Stepen Hicks from Page 92 and 93 of his book, Explaining Postmodernism: "In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau started his attack on the foundation of the Enlightenment project: Reason. The philosophes were exactly right that reason was the foundation of civilization. Civilization's rational progress, however, is anything but progress, for civilization is achieved at the expense of morality. There is an inverse relationship between cultural and moral development. Culture does generate much learning, luxury and sophistication--but learning, luxury and sophistication all cause moral degradation. The root of our moral degradation is reason, the original sin of mankind. Before their reason was awakened, humans were simple beings, mostly solitary, satisfying their wants easily by gathering from their immediate environment. That happy state was ideal: 'this author should have said that since the state of nature is the state in which the concern for our own self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others, that state was consequently the most appropriate for peace and best suited for the human race.' But by some unexplainable, unfortunate occurrence, reason was awakened, and once awakened it disgorged a Pandora's Box of problems upon the world, transforming human nature to the point that we can no longer return to our happy, original state." Rousseau contends that the original sin was reasoning, and that evil entered the world with this fall from natural grace, when people begin to think, and build immoral civilization. Rather, Leftist-postmodernists, the intellectual offspring of Rosseau, Kant, Marx and Rorty, are guilty of committing the second original sin, willful disobedience to the rule of God among humans on earth. Obviously, Hicks and I would disagree vociferously. He, the atheist, libertarian, Ayn Randian and conservative secular humanist, would insist that reasoning is what makes humans moral and civilized, that just choosing based on our feelings tears the world apart, as the postmodernists are doing. My concept of the second original sin, the sin of disobedience, is criminally activated and influential when people feel more than they think, run in cliques, and cling to nature and natural ways. The weak, natural first, original virtue would be our benevolent, kind impulses that can be strengthened into virtuous character in the human choosing to be good and serve God. The second, metaphysical, spiritual and unnatural and learned virtue is to obey God and serve God. In society, as logical (still feeling some) individuators, is how the humans of the future will be the new, enlightened children of light. Hicks would deny it, but he is unwittingly setting up the conditions for the religion of Mavellonialism to come to the fore.