Thank you so much St. Augustine for your view on hell, the depravity of man, the anger of God, and of course original sin! How’d he get the name “Saint“? We come into a broken world, but unbroken. We come into a sinful world, but not yet sinners. We have to make that decision on our very own. As an offense against God by man’s first parents, it made every man an automatic sinner, born without sanctifying grace. Really?
What corporation would produce a faulty product, over and over again? None that will stay in business. Why would God produce faulty humans. I have to agree with so many that remind us that we were “original blessings” long before we opt to line up with the sinful world.
Sin entered the world because it is THE WORLD! Duh !
I don’t have to embrace some convoluted hereditary story to get that! But, for Augustine, as for many theologians since, the idea of a primordial sin helped explain one of religion’s oldest mysteries: the existence of evil in a world supposedly created by a good God.
We live in the 3rd dimension! Mystery solved!
But Calvin and Luther couldn’t shake the religious conceptual marbles out of their heads either after a thousand years of evidence. For John Calvin, Adam’s fall “perverted the whole order of nature in heaven and on earth.” To Martin Luther, man was simul justus et peccator—a sinner savable by God’s grace received through faith alone.
Biological transmission, from a spiritual being? I don’t think so! Let me end with a few quotes from men far greater in knowledge and understanding than I………..
Dutch Theologian Ansfried Hulsbosch suggests that man is born to seek perfection; in so far as he fails to grow toward this spiritual goal, he is both “originally” and personally sinful. Englebert Gutwenger of Innsbruck University conceives of original sin “not as any kind of sin at all but rather as a divinely willed state of “innate indifference” from which each man will eventually make a decision for or against Christ, for or against eschatological life.
Vanderbilt Theologian Ray Hart, says original sin means “That you can count on man to be a bastard.” In a century that has so far produced Hiroshima, this is an insight that is hard to ignore. Søren Kierkegaard described original sin as a sense of dread; for most of mankind, it is still an uncomfortably familiar feeling.
I’ve got enough guilt to get over, let along to add the baggage of some mythical couple in a garden setting the tone for my life. Of course maybe I’m just stressing out and looking for getting another piece of religious guilt off my back. Coincidently, the Orthodox Christian church calls what the West labels, “original sin“, as “original guilt“.
Having found freedom & liberty in Jesus, the Christ: I stand! 
I just think that being HUMAN is inherently confusing. We don’t KNOW ALL or SEE ALL. Because of that, it is easy to make mistakes. Staying in communion with the SPIRIT and doing what we see or hear the HOLY SPIRIT directing gives us the ability to make fewer mistakes.
The story of Adam and Eve to me only illustrates the confusion of being human and the need to live by the SPIRIT. The original sin is nothing more than operating on a plane different from the SPIRIT. Am I missing something?????
Original sin is man’s intellectual attempt to explain how EVIL got in the world which incidently, helps maintain church control of the people. How cool is that? NOT!