To sin has been defined as "to miss the mark".
"Original sin" is the creation story of the WESTERN WORLD.
Most people assume the western church shares the same creation story as Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians; a quaint story of apples, snakes and fig leaves which was rendered redundant, except for fundamentalist Americans, by Darwin. They are wrong on both counts. In no other culture were people understood to be born bad; in no other were they conceived with a permanently corrupted nature that faced the wrath and judgment of God. The deity of the west is unique in judging people before they commit a moral act.
(From Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World, by James Boyce)
Original sin is a WESTERN CON-CEPT that states that sin entered the human world through Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden and that human beings have since lived with the consequences of this first sin. This concept was developed by the early Greek fathers of the Church but was more precisely pronounced by later Latin writers culminating with Augustine.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity did NOT accept Augustine’s notion of original sin and saw its consequence not as guilt but as mortality. Guilt is only acquitted through the personal exercise of the free will, through personal sin. This experience is different from the Western, more legalistic, post-Augustinian, medieval conception of ‘original sin’ which makes every human guilty of the sin committed by Adam in paradise”
Afrikan cultures rarely use the term “sin” as it is understood today. They generally speak in terms of a “wrong doing”. This Icept was known long before the western Christian concept of Adam and Eve. We can see this in the Laws of Ma’aT, in the very first confession:
42 Principles of Ma'at
1. I have not committed sin.
2. I have not committed robbery with violence.
3. I have not stolen.
4. I have not slain men and women
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