When I was a child I had no understanding of Original Sin. Now I am an adult I remain in ignorance of its nature still - but I have long since shed the guilt that it inspires. Not that I have become Godless, rather that I have shed the Christian accretions around the (to me natural and unthinking) Monotheism that has been a part of my view of the universe for as long as I can remember. It is in my nature to believe in Sovereign Authority, just as it is in the nature of others to believe in other things.
It is a natural injustice to impute to another the guilt that belongs to someone else - especially when the other cannot possibly have been party to the original crime.
My God made men to love and to hate each other, to be confused as well as illuminated, to be vicious as well as virtuous, compounded as much of air and fire as earth and water, with no division of moral and immoral, physical and spiritual, between those elements. And the judgements my God passes are aesthetic - not based in jurisprudence, nor on a 'personal commitment', nor on any other criterion than how well or ill a particular life adorns a design that cannot be properly understood by any creature, because that which is less than (and less than because in itself incapable of creating anything truly new) cannot understand that which is greater than (greater because of this capacity for original creation). Which does not mean that even the most fundamental of the operations of the universe are beyond the reach of our reason, nor unamenable to our control. However, God is not the universe. God is more, and greater than, the universe.
There is no sin in the sense of an infraction of Divine law. There is however what is beautiful and what is ugly in the eyes of God. However, what constitutes this beauty, this ugliness, is a mystery to me.
If I could understand the criterion of God's aesthetic the existence of natual injustice would also be comprehensible, and would be seen not as injustice at all but as adornment. That it is an adornment (whether in ugliness or beauty I cannot say) in the eyes of my God I infer from the fact that it exists as a perpetual aspect of human existence - just as natural justice does.
Someone will ask me 'But why suppose the existence of God at all?' To me that basic assumption is as natural and necessary a part of my being as is the act of drawing breath. God is. What God is, is a different question, and one that I can debate.
God's favourite hobby appears to be genocide. To the humanity that suffers it, genocide can only appear as an ugliness. To God, however, such a moment may be one of supreme aesthetic pleasure, and the opposition between his pleasure (if pleasure it is) and our suffering, along with the capacity to ask 'Why are we suffering?' without being able to determine an answer, are enactments of his humour.
As is sex. And the existence of the Ostrich and the Duck-billed Platypus. And the Ebola Virus. And AIDS.
I am convinced in my own mind that the debates which rage over the nature of God, Sin, Virtue, Heaven, Hell, and all such (or at least the creation of the capacity to carry on such debates, as well as the limitation that prevents us from resolving them) are also his sense of humour at work.
My God has made himself known to me, and at the same time made me understand that I cannot know him, cannot buy salvation from him through obedience, cannot buy damnation from him through disobedience, and that the attempt to conceive of him under any head of human experience is a form of blasphemy. Fortunately, it's a form that appears to amuse him.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts." Isaiah 55: 8-9
C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.
~~DivasRule~~
