The Illusion of Original Sin

By Patricia Flasch

When St. Augustine came up with this idea of ‘original sin’, he must have been really off his game…

Full of self-loathing and shame, he projected his own deepest suffering on the collective, all human kind.

Then, he decided, since he was, and then we were, rotten to the core – he came up with this hair-brained idea that Adam was a bad dude for eating the apple and Eve was a fallen woman for biting into the same fruit, and then they both needed to be ‘punished’ for their sins…

And, we all bought in and this archaic set of beliefs has been going on and on and on for many lifetimes and all across the world…

I am here to challenge St. Augustine – I do have compassion for his suffering but he really needed to work it out inside himself instead of pissing on humanity…

WE WERE NOT BORN INTO ORIGINAL SIN, WE WERE, INSTEAD, BORN INTO A STATE OF GRACE and it’s GRACE that lives in the well spring of our beings, and GRACE that is guiding us home right now even while we read this poem…

My husband says that ‘original sin’ turned out to be a great marketing tool for the church.  Since we are sinners and we are born that way, we need a priest or a minister to take us out of that dark place – and since we don’t have a direct connection with the Divine, we need these intermediaries and we need to fill these collection plates and go to confession and sing Mea Culpa forever…

Now we have a new song, Grace is our deepest truth,

the one that lives inside behind the story about the suffering and the inherent badness

 and now I’m a prophet but so are you

 because you KNOW that you are holy and following your deepest desires brings you home

and so we no longer have to fill collection plates or go to confession and instead we are out singing in the streets and dancing til dawn…

Yes, that’s right, I’m boldly suggesting that we do a ‘break dance’ –

Break from sin, shame or punishment…  you see what I mean here?