My first thought is that this is one of the questions that I love.
My second thought is that this is getting a bit too far afield and maybe needs to be split off.
So I started searching backwards to where this started and I found the topic turning to sin and original sin sparked by RichardG’s comment about the difference between having a sinful nature and being born with it, which heddle comments on with this post.
As far as the discussion is going I find much to agree with in the words of both RichardG and Christy. I don’t think tossing Genesis 2-4 out the window as having no historical content is necessary. And I don’t believe this is about condmenation for mistakes but the self-destructive consequences of bad habits. For that is my answer to the question of “what is sin?” Christy is quite right to point out the range of theological understandings of “original sin,” but I am certainly in agreement with RichardG’s rejection that this means sin is compulsory because of some altered nature we are born with. I thread the needle by taking that famous passage, “none can say they are without sin,” to say that by the time we learn to speak it is inevitable that we have acquired some self-destructive habits in our thinking if not in our actions.
I really doubt that God attaches as much importance to this as people do. I think what concerns God is the battle against these self-destructive habits and for him it is a question of what medicine is helping and what isn’t.
Since I can observe for myself that bad habits act like a progressive disease destroying more and more of our integrity, awareness, and free will – then the answer is yes, in that sense, all this staring from an original self-destructive habit does make sense to me.
Because I don’t believe this a matter of performing some human sacrifice powered magic but about changing the way we think and that takes a lot more than just one event. It takes a long history of working on us and that is the story I see being told in the Bible.
Well it never was from God in the first place. But it is certainly possible that religion has made a fundamental problem even worse. I think most things are more of a mixed bag than we might think. Many languages, cultures, war, and religion all have BOTH positive and negative aspects to them. And to be sure change often comes with ten steps forward and nine steps backward.
What??? Free will means no consequences of your choices and actions? It does NOT! I agree that it makes little sense that heaven and hell are a matter of reward and punishment for our actions – if that is what you mean. But I don’t think that is what heaven and hell is about. It is about a choice we have in dealing with sin. We can either fight these self-destructive habits and get help cutting them out, or we can let them them destroy us as they grow within like a cancer.
In any case, I think you very much over-reacted to the things Christy has said.
Because God made us for a relationship with Him. I don’t think God ever intended for this no win scenario where His presence in their lives was doing more harm than good (as someone to blame things on rather than someone to learn things from). When I read Genesis 6, I see a God in the worse kind of agony imaginable, where everything originally good has turned into something completely evil – clearly this is not a situation God would put Himself into intentionally.