'It is, obviously, a belief that violates the most basic notions of justice. No wonder John Taylor of Norwich exclaimed, "What a God must he be, who can curse his innocent creatures before they have a being!" And yet the individual components of the idea are utterly familiar. Everyone knows that some people are born with a malady of some kind: a birth defect resulting from the mistransmission of genetic information, say, or a disorder (HIV, hepatitis) passed from mother to child through the umbilical cord. And we acknowledge that some social circumstances make certain sins all but inevitable. I don't see how I, as a white Southerner, raised in the 1960s and 1970s could have avoided some taint of racism, yet I don't think I should use that upbringing to declare myself innocent. Most of us are also comfortable with talk of "the human condition" - general circumstances shared by everyone, if nothing else "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." So we comprehend inherited affliction, collective and inherited responsibility, universally shared circumstances. It is the joining of these ideas that strains our minds. We struggle to hold together a model of human sinfulness that is universal rather than local, in which we inherit sin rather than choose it, and in which, nevertheless, we are fully, terrifyingly responsible for our condition.'
Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History, p.xiv.
