Seek change not because a thing is wrong, but because it no longer makes an accurate statement of who you are. Neale Donald Walsch
Imagine, when your children were young, if someone had told them you didn’t really love them. What if they thought they were unacceptable to you from the day they were born? What if they feared being punished for it?
As a child I was taught that I was unacceptable to God because of a sin Adam and Eve committed in the Garden of Eden. Every day when school ended I said my Act of Contrition. "Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell". I was 8 years old.
The nuns told me God made it a sin in the very beginning. I didn’t know until much later in life that it wasn't the truth. “Original Sin” was a theological creation of the church in the 16th century. It was never taught by Jesus, never mentioned by Paul, and nowhere does it appear in the Bible.
Then where did the idea come from? Somewhere along the line a reason had to be found to explain man’s sinful nature. It was St. Augustine who found it in the 4th century. He couldn’t seem to blame himself for his lifelong struggle with sexual immorality. In his landmark Confessions he described it as the result of the sin of Adam and Eve, transmitted through the ages to the entire human race by means of sexual intercourse. That belief received papal sanction, and at the Council of Trent in 1546 became the official doctrine of Western Christianity. It decreed that human life was fallen, sinful and broken – capable only of begging for mercy from an avenging God.
And so developed the single most crippling obstacle to personal growth in human history. And at what price? Carl Jung said a person can never realize his greatest potential without self-acceptance. But if God doesn’t accept us, how can we ever accept ourselves? Original Sin means there is something fundamentally and intrinsically wrong with who we are. I don’t say it was a deliberate fabrication of the Church – more a misunderstanding of a sincere group of early believers. But excusing them for their naivety doesn’t mean it didn’t produce a fatal misunderstanding of God’s relationship to man. (I intended to call this piece The Mother Of All Conspiracies - nothing could be more deserving of the title - but decided it might be too provocative.) But the damage has been done, and the religious trauma it induces can take a lifetime to overcome. Once the fear of judgment and eternal damnation enters the human psyche no amount of assurance can overcome the nagging thought that we are not right with God - not even a Savior.
The question I have is this. Why do we hold onto an ancient doctrine that has no scriptural validation? It doesn't have to be this way. A clue may lie in an often overlooked passage in the Bible. It says God created man in his own image and likeness but then caused him to fall into a deep sleep. Nowhere does it say God ever woke him up. Maybe he intended that to be accomplished later by the work of his Holy Spirit.
That spirit is in you now, inviting you to awaken and reclaim your natural birthright as a beloved, and innocent, child of the King.
