I am not sure where I became acquainted with the “original sin” concept, but, It always seemed to to me a bit of a dead end; a “screwed-before-you-begin”, sort of idea that never made much sense to me. It was like God made you broken, didn’t provide the glue to fix anything, and then punished you big time for being broken in the first place.
Fortunately, my parents were mostly concerned with the loving aspect of God; Things like God loves you, and how we should love each other. Later, when I attended seminary for some music studies, it seemed like this “messed up from the beginning” idea was the foundation of everything. I guess Jesus was supposed to be the glue, but nothing ever really got fixed on this planet; things were just endured. Everything, it seems, would be fixed later on when the sheep were divided from the goats.
This kind of view always seemed to me more about livestock inspection than getting close to God. from this point of view, you are always a sheep and you spend most of your time inspecting the herd for goats. Interestingly it resigned the role of evangelism to; “how to convince other people that we are in fact correct.”
Now a days, I am finding that this concept is encouraging goat-hood. Instead of encouraging people to become a solid member of the team, they are actually becoming motivated to look elsewhere, and intentionally color outside the lines.