ORIGINAL SIN: Are We to Blame for a Sin We Never Committed?

The Church says that to be right with God, you need God living inside you and having a relationship with you. This relationship is broken by committing mortal sin. Mortal sin kills the relationship with God. That is why the Church says such sin deserves everlasting punishment in Hell.

Original sin is the doctrine that we come into existence without a relationship with God. The Bible says the sin of Adam and Eve, the originators of humankind, affects all of us. They ate forbidden fruit in defiance of God. The fruit looked good and the sin looked good. The story implies that wrongdoing can look like goodness.  The serpent, presumed to be Satan, asked Adam and Eve in the Garden to know good and evil meaning they must decide what it is without regard to God.  And they took the forbidden fruit as if it were a sacrament that would achieve that.  The story condemns man-made sacraments and attempts to use even ideas about God and what God wants in the place of God.

Eve was supposedly taken from Adam’s side to be his partner but Genesis does not really say she is equal to him in every respect.  Equal is always an unclear term.  There is no room in Genesis for the odd idea that Adam was God’s first draft and Eve the second.  Eve is described as Adam’s helper.  Adam is presented as the correct model and Eve was made from his body making her his twin sister in a manner of speaking.  Adam's DNA must have been sex-changed.

With all those moral problems in the story, Christians are only worried about how they took the forbidden fruit.

Adam was more passive than Eve in relation to taking the fruit. She grabs it and gives it to him.  Also, God told him the fruit was banned not Eve.  Adam let her eat the fruit too so he is to blame for not trying to talk her out of it.  Eve is punished for a command she broke which she had only her husbands word for.  Eve was punished for taking Adam's word for it that God spoke.  Here a man's authority is regarded as being that of God and the woman is asked to have faith while the man communes with God.  This is the prophetic pattern in the Bible where no woman serves properly as a prophet.

Original sin then involves rebellion against God's unnecessary command, Adam letting Eve tell  him what to do, Eve ignoring Adam's testimony that God banned the fruit.

Genesis speaks of the first human sin yes but yet it only worries about death and suffering not sin. It is not really about grace or man separating from a relationship with God.

The Church does not officially accept the view that we are blamed for committing the sin of Adam and Eve as if we were them but it permits that interpretation. Church teaching then is officially that we are not NECESSARILY responsible for their sin but we MIGHT be. It says original sin does not NECESSARILY tell us to accuse ourselves of a sin we did not commit.  Even permitting such a terrible teaching is bad.  Teaching such a thing is as bad.

God threatened Adam and Eve if they ate the fruit.  They were threatened with death.  Adam and Eve did not understand what death of any kind was. They did not see sin. So they are punished for trying to understand by eating of the tree. But that amounts to God giving them a prohibition that they could not comprehend or interpret and even worse he punishes them severely and permanently.  He curses the earth to punish them which amounts to using the animal kingdom to potentially prey on them and hurt them.  The earth becomes a threat.  All that nastiness means that Christianity is evil for blaming Adam and Eve.  And they are worshipping a God who they know is capable of being unjust to babies over what Adam and Eve did for he was unjust to them as well.  They may only think he does not hate the babies - maybe he does!

The Church tells people they do not need to blame babies for Adam's sin that hoping it will warm them to the doctrine. It is conscious of the shameless depravity of accusing an innocent baby of eating the forbidden fruit when the baby didn’t exist in those days. But it is not worse to say that an all-good God keeps out of the baby until baptism and refuses to have a relationship? How can anyone say it is bad to blame an innocent baby for Adam’s sin when the idea of original sin has the idea of God punishing a baby for nothing?

The infallible apostle Paul, disciple of Jesus said that this sin, the fall, was an unmitigated disaster.  But he cheerfully adds that the RESULTS of the gift of Jesus outweigh the bad results of the fall. He specifies that one single fall caused judgement and condemnation from God while Jesus got us acquitted by grace and that is better. See Romans 5. The same chapter says that it is certain that one man’s fall brought death into the world and even more certain that Jesus gave the free gift of being made right with God and that nobody deserves this gift.  The idea is that Jesus earned it for us.  The doctrine of the fall then does something worse than blame innocent people for Adam's sin.  Despite the dreadful suffering and evil undergone by humankind and despite "saved" Christians being a handful Paul says it is more than worth it!  That is callous religious fanaticism.  And made worse by the fact that Christian have a salvation that makes them no better than the unsaved!  Paul is not even thinking of Heaven but of holiness which he sees as a gift from God for holiness is the reverse of sin.  So reading between the lines, the suffering and death even of little babies and all the attraction to evildoing is worth Christians feeling they are holy and acquitted by God!  This evil chapter is read at Christian services and regarded as a theological gem by the Churches so it has full authority for believers.  It should be protested!

The Bible simply says that in Adam all sinned and that is why all die. It says sinned. Original sin is not really sin at all unless you are justly to blame for what Adam and Eve did.

Some Catholics say that original sin is Adam and Eve’s fault and not God’s fault and that it is a mystery how that could be. If so, that means they have to believe that the problem of evil, how a good God can be good while not stopping evil and or suffering, is a mystery and cannot be solved.
 
The problem of evil is a denial of our right to know that a Good God can let evil happen. If we don't know we are only guessing.