The Fall, Redemption and What it Means to Humanity Part I

When one looks at the violence in the world; at wars and man's inhumanity to man it becomes obvious that we humans suffer from some sort of pathology. I actually prefer the word pathology to the term sin. the term sin has developed a religious connotation over time that I do not think was intended in its original use. Both of the scriptural words translated as sin have essentially the same meaning. CHATA, the Hebrew word translated sin and HAMARTIA the Greek word translated sin have similar meanings. CHATA means to miss the way and HAMARTIA means to miss the mark. In my view this means that one misses the mark or way in terms of God's intention; It means to miss the intention of the creative source of the universe whether one calls it God, the creative source, or the collective consciousness. I like to think of it and describe it as humanities pathology.

So then, how did this pathology enter into the life and affairs of humans? It appears that there was/is some kind of fall. It was/is a falling away from the intention of God. It seems an obvious conclusion to draw whenever one looks at the local or national news broadcasts. The symptoms and results of our pathology seems to be everywhere all the time. Certainly it is not the result of the prototypes eating a certain forbidden fruit. That is a metaphor and the story is an allegory. The creation story however has some interesting truths about it. The fruit is the knowledge of good and evil and the punishment for partaking is death. It would be fair to characterize the reason for the fall, as the combination of the ability to discern good from evil, along side the ever present fact of mortality. These seem to be conditions brought on by the four dimensional universe and self awareness.

Further, it seems that the knowledge of good and evil coupled with mortality are responsible for most of the evil in the world. Death creates the need for the survival instinct. The survival instinct promotes greed. In the animal world this is merely a fact and the strongest deadliest predators triumph over the weaker species. But, when you add the element of the knowledge of good and evil, and one realizes that living is good and death is bad; that abundance is good and scarcity is bad, judgment comes into being. Judgment is a good thing if one judges fairly. However, humans with the survival instinct tend to judge erroneously in favor of themselves. They use the knowledge of good and evil to justify themselves over others. Therefore, the knowledge of good and evil, combined with the human ego controlled by the survival instinct, causes humans to exercise faulty judgment. We end with the situation where those with power judge and, by virtue of the power can cause their judgment to stand. This is the source of much of the suffering in the world. We have looked at the pathology, the sin. Tomorrow we will look at the redemption and a possible cure.