Original Sin

All human beings have rights to food, clothing, shelter, personal dignity, and safety rights that have to be honored if the human community is to be humane. Earth is populated with billions of people, millions of whom are malnourished, homeless, poor, oppressed, illiterate, exploited, dying from treatable diseases, living the social and economic consequences of the debilitating cycles of poverty, domestic violence, autocratic political regimes, racism, colonialism and militarism. Humans participate in the genocide of other humans. It is sometimes referred to as ethnic cleansing, whereby one group of people from one ethnic or cultural background insists on its natural superiority over another and justifies its violence in attempting to eradicate some humans from the face of the earth. These realities dehumanize human existence and leave the human community anything but humane.

Then there are decisions made by industrialized nations about the use and abuse of the environment, [Page 328]decisions that have long-term consequences for the whole world with respect to air, water, and land. Environmental theory says we may all live by robbing nature, but some standards of living demand that the robbery continue excessively and indifferently.

As a result of excessiveness and indifference, innocent people suffer. At times, the guilty go free and injustice prevails. Such injustice is often passed on from generation to generation. Fear, guilt, despair, estrangement, anxiety, and violence seem, then, to be as much part of the human saga as the experience of loving relationships, joy, interpersonal and social harmony, respect, creativity, physical and emotional security, and hope.

Intelligibly explaining this complex and often contradictory human condition into which we are born is the challenge for those attempting to support the psychosocial and spiritual development of children and adolescents. Those who study and write about children, such as the psychiatrist Robert Coles, report that at an early age, children start wondering about the nature, complexity, and destiny of their lives. Furthermore, awareness of anxiety begins early in life and focuses on why bad things happen to good people or simply on why things are the way they are in a seemingly unjust world. It is quite common in the early years of religious training for children to realize that the world as they know it is not the world intended by the God of their religious tradition. Such moral and spiritual sensibilities take shape in the early formative years. Children can be aware that some of the entanglements they experience in their young lives do not arise from their personal choice, desire, or will. Original sin is a Christian doctrine or faith-based teaching that attempts to make sense of this experience that there is something terribly awry with the world.

The Creation stories in the Hebrew Scriptures in Genesis 1 and 2, while distinct from each other and written over 500 years apart (Genesis 2 being older than Genesis 1), reveal a Creator God active in designing the features of the universe with creation's centerpiece being humans, male and female, made in God's own image to share with God the stewardship of all creation. As the Genesis story unfolds, the tale of Adam and Eve in the garden describes a decisive moment that damages the covenantal relationship between God and humans. The choice to disobey God turns paradise to predicament. Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden, the cunning serpent, fruit trees, fig leaves, egoism, terror, shame, and banishment, all are symbols in this powerful story of The Fall. Christian theology teaches that with Adam's “fall” all humanity sinned. This original sin ruptured the primal flow between Creator and creatures albeit without severing God's unconditional love for His creatures and creation.

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