Quotes about Original sin

The infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile, Stirr'd up with envy and revenge, deceiv'd the mother of mankind.

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden.

Love is the central command in Scripture and judgment the central prohibition. Indeed, judgment is the "original sin" in Scripture. This is why the forbidden tree in the center of the garden—the prohibition around which life in the garden revolved—was called the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil."

A lot of Christians have been taught a story that begins in chapter 3 of Genesis, instead of chapter 1. If your story doesn't begin in the beginning, but begins in chapter 3, then it starts with sin, and so the story becomes about dealing with the sin problem. So Jesus is seen as primarily dealing with our sins.

Fear is the original sin," suddenly said a still, small voice away back—back—back of Valancy's consciousness. "Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something." Valancy stood up. She was still in the clutches of fear, but her soul was her own again. She would not be false to that inner voice.

Fear is the original sin, wrote John Foster. Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading.

Temptation has been here ever since the Garden of Eden.

In Adam's fallWe sinned all.

Satan accuses God of falsehoods of envy, and of malignity, and our first parents subscribe to a calumny thus vile and execrable.

We crave autonomy. Autonomy is closely linked to arrogance. They are both expressions of human pride, but autonomy suggests that we want to be separate from more than over. We want to establish the rules rather than submit to the lordship of the living God. This was the essence of Adam's original sin. We want to interpret the world according to our system of thought. We want to establish our own parallel universe, separate from God's.

Our starting place was always original goodness,10 not original sin. This makes our ending place—and everything in between—possessing an inherent capacity for goodness, truth, and beauty.

In this book I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens; yet nothing in us wants to believe it. I actually think it is the only workable meaning of any remaining notion of "original sin.