Are we naturally bad?

[PumpkinSeed]

We need a Savior because we sin, nit because we were constituted evil.

God Bless

Falling into sin and temptation is giving into evil. Since humans are naturally tempted and faulty (such as the case with adam and eve), then yes we were made with weakness to give into sin easily. that’s why we need a savior. If it was possible to not sin at all, we wouldn’t need him. Or at least not everyone would.

I’m not saying somebody is born evil, im saying that its just not possible to not sin. Everyone will be tempted sometime in their life. thats just how it is.

 

[christosdavid]

The difference Augustine and Thomas drew which Luther failed draw (and hey I am Lutheran) is that we are born with affections which tend toward sin and away from God because we desire to worship ourselves first above all things, but that is not the same thing as inborn guilt of sin. To say we have inherited our father Adam’s nature means that we have inherited his desire to choose for ourselves what is right and wrong verses trusting the true inborn nature of right and wrong given to us by God, which is the conscience.

Remember in Romans 1 Paul says…

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Now there are many who argue that there is natural knowledge and there is saving knowledge but there are two problems with this.

1. In verse 21 Paul says “they knew God” and the word knew in the Greek is γνόντες (g’notes) which comes from the word γινώσκω (g’nosko) which means to know, but it does not mean to just have common cognitive knowledge of a fact but it means to experience as in Adam knew his wife and she bore him a son. In other words this knowledge of God goes far beyond a simple cognition that the trees did not make themselves it is an actual experiential knowledge of God which man is born with, and the text says so because Paul says “they became futile in their thinking…” So this is not how man was born it what man becomes.
2. Those who argue this knowledge is merely cognition and not salvific in nature have a problem. How can such knowledge be sufficient to damn once refused, which Paul plainly says it is, verse 24 “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts…” and verse 28 “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” if it is not also sufficient to save if it is obeyed?

**But then comes the problem that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and those after them tried to cut through with a *Platonic doctrine ***of the universal inborn corruption of man, how does a man born with an experiential knowledge of God and without guilt of sin choose to sin when it is so bad for him to do so?
That is where Augustine and Thomas come in. In the Garden Adam did not choose to sin because he thought it would be bad for him, seeing that the woman had eaten and had not died (and remember Paul says she was deceived it was Adam who committed the grievous sin and in Adam we are fallen not Eve) Adam chose to disbelieve God in spite of God’s word to him because he believed he would be like God. Adam took the fruit because he thought it was good. He believed the serpent over God and chose for himself what is right and wrong.

It is that tendency that Augustine says we are born with; that we desire to choose for ourselves what is good and bad and we do not listen to our consciences and we deliberately choose the wicked for its temporal pleasure over the blessed goodness which endures but for which we must wait. The reason why is that we desire to worship ourselves. That is what all sin really is. It is the decision within the human heart to lift up the temporary to the place of the eternal for the sake of its passing pleasure because we want to be god in God’s place.

But God will not allow anyone to take His place and that is why the Bible says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” because all men act upon this tendency within their hearts that they have inherited from Adam.

But such a tendency is not of itself actual sin and neither is it actual guilt. And so we are not born guilty before God but we make ourselves that way because we are idolaters of the self above all things, even above our knowledge of God. But God in His mercy has put forth Christ to die for us while we were yet sinners, and so no man may boast before God because no man has not sinned, save one, and so we cling to Gospel of our Lord because it is life and all blessedness is found therein.

God Bless

really? perhaps you could clarify then…

 

[christosdavid]

We are children born under wrath. We are born under the curse God placed upon Adam, but nowhere does God say that Adam’s sin is such that all his children will be born guilty of it, that is not part of the curse, but that the world is fallen and creation ruined by sin is cause of God’s wrath because holiness resists wickedness always. Thus it is that everyone born of Adam is born under the wrath of God because we are in this fallen world and we love it oh so much. It is our very love for the temporal that causes us to sin because the temporal feeds our selfish nature.

But having a nature which tends toward sin and being born actually guilty of a sin which we did not commit are two very different things.

God Bless

physis (ie physical) is definately the word for nature, because of our nature we are children of wrath. even our bodies decay and the world is bound in corruption until the revealing of God’s children (cf Rom 8).

 

[Della]

Falling into sin and temptation is giving into evil. Since humans are naturally tempted and faulty (such as the case with adam and eve), then yes we were made with weakness to give into sin easily. that’s why we need a savior. If it was possible to not sin at all, we wouldn’t need him. Or at least not everyone would.

I’m not saying somebody is born evil, im saying that its just not possible to not sin. Everyone will be tempted sometime in their life. thats just how it is.

God did not create Adam and Eve with a “weakness to give into sin”. Rather he created them with free will, and with their own free will they gave into sin. Only AFTER they had fallen were they deprived of the will to always do good under all circumstances. This is what is meant by “weakening of the will”. We no longer want to always do what God wants, but want to do what we want all too often. To cross God’s will even once is too often, but you get the point.

 

[Vouthon]

I have been slowly re-reading a book I first read a year ago. It is called Original Goodness, written by Eknath Easwaren. He came here from India as a Fulbright Scholar to teach English literature. Eventually he moved to UC Berkeley where he taught both English literature and Indian meditation. He was a Hindu but his books are addressed to all, especially to Christians who made up the religious majority in his adopted country. He went to a Catholic Jesuit school as a child. Coming from an impoverished background, the priests “head-hunted” him, gave him a thorough education and he even went on too represent the school in competitions - even though he wasn’t Catholic! I have a few of his books - all of them are wonderful and I encourage you to buy them. His books draw on the spiritual traditions and beliefs of all the major world religions.

Original Goodness is a meditation on the beatitudes. One quote he gives is from a 14th century Christian mystic -

"Goodness has no need to enter the soul, " wrote a fourteenth-century Catholic mystic, “It is there already, simply unperceived”.

On the book jacket, it says this: “Love, compassion, meaning, hope, and freedom from fear are not qualities we need to acquire…We simply need to uncover what we already have.”

This is exactly what I believe to be the profound message we find in Schindler’s List.

In Indian mysticism - Hinduism and Sikhism - this divine core of supreme goodness is called simply atman, “the Self.” Jewish mysticism puts this idea into powerful imagery. Shekinah, the Presence of God, is dispersed throughout creation in every creature, like sparks scattered from the pure flame of spirit that is the Lord. And each spark, apparently alone in the darkness of this material world, wanders the creation in exile, seeking to return to its divine source. In St. Augustine’s words “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

We often hear a lot about “original sin” from TV evangelists and many Christians but little about the Original Goodness that precede original sin and is still present within our deepest core. The human being is made in the Image of God. At his deepest core, is God pure and simple. Our true self is God’s image - there is a spirit within us that the Bible tells us God ‘breathed into us’; unconditioned, universal, deathless; a divine core which cannot be separated from God - that spark of divinity which the Catholics mystics say is hidden in every one of us, regardless of our sins or past mistakes, is the perfect reflection of the One God - his Image.

“…I have spoken at times of a light in the soul, a light that is uncreated and uncreatable…to the extent that we can deny ourselves and turn away from created things, we shall find our unity and blessing in that little spark in the soul, which neither space nor time touches…As the Godhead is nameless, and all naming is alien to Him, so also the soul is nameless; for it is here the same God…To guage the soul we must guage it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same…The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge…The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is, and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God…You need not seek God here or there: he is no farther off than the door of the heart. There he stands and waits and waits until he finds you ready to open and let him in. You need not call him from a distance; to wait until you open for him is harder for him than for you…Your opening and his entering are but one moment…”

***- Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1327), Catholic Mystic & priest ***

“…My Me is God, nor do I recognise any other Me except my God Himself…Divine light entered my heart from His love that did never fully wane, though indeed, dear, I can understand how a person’s faith can at times flicker, for what is the mind to do with something that becomes the mind’s ruin: a God that consumes us in His grace. I have seen what you want; it is there, a Beloved of infinite tenderness…He has never left you. It is just that your soul is so vast that just like the earth in its innocence, it may think, “I do not feel my lover’s warmth against my face right now.” But look, dear, is not the sun reaching down its arms and always holding a continent in its light? God cannot leave us. It is just that our soul is so vast, we do not always feel His lips upon the veil…”

- Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), Catholic mystic

“…Even though it is covered up, because it is God that has sowed this seed in us, pressed it in, begotten it, it cannot be extirpated or die out; it glows and sparkles, burning and giving light, and always it moves upward toward God…”

- Origen (184 – 253), Catholic Church Father

I read the Beatitudes to focus myself upon “original goodness”

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

"…We are made, the scriptures of all religions assure us, in the image of God. Nothing can change that original goodness. Whatever mistakes we have made in the past, whatever problems we may have in the present, in every one of us this “uncreated spark in the soul” remains untouched, ever pure, ever perfect. Even if we try with all our might to douse or hide it, it is always ready to set our personality ablaze with light…The implications of this statement are far-reaching. Rightly understood, they can lift the most oppressive burden of guilt, restore any loss of self-esteem. For if goodness is our real core, goodness that can be hidden but never taken away, then goodness is not something we have to get. We do not have to figure out how to make ourselves good; all we need do is remove what covers the goodness that is already there. To be sure, removing these coverings is far from easy. Original goodness does not mean that you are already divine and just do not know it – much less that, as some New Age writers put it, “you yourself are God.” Having a core of goodness does not prevent the rest of personality from being a monumental nuisance. But the very concept of original goodness can transform ourlives. It does not deny what traditional religion calls sin; it simply reminds us that before original sin was original innocence. That is our real nature. Everything else – all our habits, our conditioning, our past mistakes – is a mask. A mask can hide a face completely; like that frightful iron contraption in Dumas’s novel, it can be excruciating to wear and nearly impossible to remove. But the very nature of a mask is that it can be removed. This is the promise and the purpose of all spiritual disciplines: to take off the mask that hides our real face… "

- Eknath Easwaran (1910 – 1999), Indian Hindu mystic

Speaking of the great Catholic mystic Eckhart and the church father Origen:

“…These words of Meister Eckhart, addressed to ordinary people in a quiet German-speaking town almost seven hundred years ago, testify to a discovery about the nature of the human spirit as revolutionary as Einstein’s theories about the nature of the universe. If truly understood, that discovery would transform the world we live in at least as radically as Einstein’s theories changed the world of science. “We have grasped the mystery of the atom,” General Omar Bradley once said, “and rejected the Sermon on the Mount…Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.” If we could grasp the mystery of Eckhart’s “uncreated light in the soul” – surely no more abstruse than relativity! – the transformation in our thinking would set our world right side up…“Its fruits will be God-nature!” What promise could be more revolutionary? Yet Eckhart, like other great mystics of the Catholic Church before and after him, does no more than assure us of his personal experience. The seed is there, and the ground is fertile. Nothing is required but diligent gardening to bring into existence the God-tree: a life that proclaims the original goodness in all creation…Early in the third century, a Greek Father of the Church, Origen, referred to this core of goodness as both a spark and a divine seed – a seed that is sown deep in consciousness by the very fact of our being human, made in the image of our Creator…”

- Eknath Easwaran (1910 – 1999), Indian Hindu mystic

 

[TimothyH]

I think I understand the Catholic teaching on our human dignity. I went to ccc 1700-1709 and was happily confirmed in my belief that we are made in His images and essentially good. Unfortunately there are no specific biblical references. Gaudium et Spec is good enough for me but my friend wants chapter and verse. I truly appreciate all of your responses. Thank you!

Walter

God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good. (Genesis 1:31)

-Tim-

 

[bogeydogg]

Falling into sin and temptation is giving into evil. Since humans are naturally tempted and faulty (such as the case with adam and eve), then yes we were made with weakness to give into sin easily. that’s why we need a savior. If it was possible to not sin at all, we wouldn’t need him. Or at least not everyone would.

I’m not saying somebody is born evil, im saying that its just not possible to not sin. Everyone will be tempted sometime in their life. thats just how it is.

So Adam and Eve were created less than perfect but God pronounced that creation to be “very good”. That seems odd.

Given that Adam did have the possibility to not sin and did I am somewhat dubious of your last sentence in the first paragraph.

God Bless

 

[bogeydogg]

really? perhaps you could clarify then…

I said this…

“But then comes the problem that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and those after them tried to cut through with a Platonic doctrine of the universal inborn corruption of man, how does a man born with an experiential knowledge of God and without guilt of sin choose to sin when it is so bad for him to do so?”

and so asked a question which Calvinist/Platonic thinking cannot answer and then by way of correction said…

“That is where Augustine and Thomas come in…”

I am making a side by side comparison between Calvin et all and Augustine and Thomas to contrast their teachings not show commonality. I am clarifying the error made by going back the sources who were misunderstood.

God Bless

 

[bogeydogg]

physis (ie physical) is definately the word for nature, because of our nature we are children of wrath. even our bodies decay and the world is bound in corruption until the revealing of God’s children (cf Rom 8).

Yes we are born under the curse of Adam. That is we are born into a fallen world that is corrupted and into bodies that are dying and will decay. That is the curse of Adam not inborn sin and guilt.

Remember the man who was blind from birth? The Apostles asked whether his blindness was a result of his father’s or mother’s sin since he, having been born this way, could not have sinned before his birth. (<–btw that is strike one against inborn guilt of sin)

Jesus answers that neither the father or mother is responsible and that the man’s blindness is to show the glory of God. And that is refutation of inheriting sin’s consequences by accident of birth directly from the mouth of our Lord.

Of course the Bible teaches that God will hold guilty the sins of the man who does not honor His Name to the fourth generation, but it also says that the father is not guilty of the son’s sin nor the son guilty fo the father’s. So what gives?

I think the answer is obvious.

Let us say that a person, oh we’ll go with me, is born into a house with a father who neither fears, honors or even believes in God. That boy grows up everyday poisoned by false doctrine from the false church his mom attends and atheism from his dad. Both the parents use drugs and drink and swear and have no honor for God in any discernable fashion. The boy grows up angry and alienated and distant from God and it is only the work of patient Christian people and the power of the Gospel and finally the forgiveness of sin and Christ’s Body and Blood that breaks this boy’s heart so that he believes and is freed from the curse.

But he is the only one of siblings who did.

Do you think a curse is not laid upon such a household? I do. But that curse is because of the poisoned environs of that household and not the sins of the father being counted against the children. Rather the sins of the father were TAUGHT to the children, and the children grew up believing the lies until they believed nothing.

I hope the distinction is clear.

God Bless

 

[poker10]

So Adam and Eve were created less than perfect but God pronounced that creation to be “very good”. That seems odd.

Given that Adam did have the possibility to not sin and did I am somewhat dubious of your last sentence in the first paragraph.

God Bless

Have to agree with this, I’m sure this is covered somewhere in thousands of years of theology. But Adam and Eve ALWAYS had the capacity to sin if they did The Original Sin. They could have been in the Garden for a million years and did nothing wrong, but one strike and your out if you eat the apple.

Funny how Satan sinned, and all those angels sinned, but not all were punished. Maybe because they had all been created by then.

 

[sw85]

A friend of mine made the statement “…we are all sinners by nature…” and I took exception. I said to him that we are all essentially good but are stained by Original Sin and then he replied that the bible says numerous times that we are filthy beings. This person is non-catholic. I then gave him the “created in God’s Image” quotation from Genesis and was further rebuffed. Are there other biblical references to the essential goodness of human nature?

Yes, the idea of man being “sinners by nature” is an ontological non sequitur, at least according to Catholic moral theology. Sin is, by definition, conscious and intentionally enacted disorder (disorder being deviation from the natural, normative order arising from human nature).

Nothing is evil by nature, not even the Devil. Your friend is probably a Protestant and so subscribes to some questionable beliefs, anyway.

 

[bogeydogg]

Have to agree with this, I’m sure this is covered somewhere in thousands of years of theology. But Adam and Eve ALWAYS had the capacity to sin if they did The Original Sin. They could have been in the Garden for a million years and did nothing wrong, but one strike and your out if you eat the apple.

Funny how Satan sinned, and all those angels sinned, but not all were punished. Maybe because they had all been created by then.

Having the possibility to sin is not the same thing as being constituted evil. Not even the most hard core Calvinist would argue that Adam and Eve were constituted evil.

Concerning the punishment for the angels. They are not redeemed. They are fallen and cast down and will never be redeemed. The possibility of redemption is not open to them. That is a punishment far more sever than Adam’s.

God Bless

 

[christosdavid]

I said this…

“But then comes the problem that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and those after them tried to cut through with a Platonic doctrine of the universal inborn corruption of man, how does a man born with an experiential knowledge of God and without guilt of sin choose to sin when it is so bad for him to do so?”

and so asked a question which Calvinist/Platonic thinking cannot answer and then by way of correction said…

“That is where Augustine and Thomas come in…”

I am making a side by side comparison between Calvin et all and Augustine and Thomas to contrast their teachings not show commonality. I am clarifying the error made by going back the sources who were misunderstood.

God Bless

ok, my misunderstanding was due to the fact that the philosophical backgrounds of Augustine and Aquinas are totally different.

Augustine was born into a neoplatonic world just as we are postmodern, Aquinas was using a aristotelian worldview.

To ask then, whether Augustine was more faithfully followed in his “Christian Platonism” by Aquinas or Calvin would definately have Calvin as the closer in worldview.

Yet to announce that they were simply using the Platonic construction without critique of that system is not correct, Augustine was converted to Christianity (similarly to Justin Martyr) after a long philosophical pathway (inspired by Cicero). Calvin was well entrenched within the Christian humanist renaisance and his first commentary was on Seneca (a stoic).

not that Christianity cannot use the prevailing worldview to better explain its purpose for being, Platonist, Aristotealian, Modernist and even postmodern are merely systems of thought - Vatican II is a good example of using critical historical method and socialogical thought to explain the source of Revelation in Christ (cf the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation).

to pit platonic structure against others would be to deprive Western Christendom of even the “Doctor of Grace”, Augustine.

 

[christosdavid]

Yes we are born under the curse of Adam. That is we are born into a fallen world that is corrupted and into bodies that are dying and will decay. That is the curse of Adam not inborn sin and guilt.

Remember the man who was blind from birth? The Apostles asked whether his blindness was a result of his father’s or mother’s sin since he, having been born this way, could not have sinned before his birth. (<–btw that is strike one against inborn guilt of sin)

Jesus answers that neither the father or mother is responsible and that the man’s blindness is to show the glory of God. And that is refutation of inheriting sin’s consequences by accident of birth directly from the mouth of our Lord.

Of course the Bible teaches that God will hold guilty the sins of the man who does not honor His Name to the fourth generation, but it also says that the father is not guilty of the son’s sin nor the son guilty fo the father’s. So what gives?

I think the answer is obvious.

Let us say that a person, oh we’ll go with me, is born into a house with a father who neither fears, honors or even believes in God. That boy grows up everyday poisoned by false doctrine from the false church his mom attends and atheism from his dad. Both the parents use drugs and drink and swear and have no honor for God in any discernable fashion. The boy grows up angry and alienated and distant from God and it is only the work of patient Christian people and the power of the Gospel and finally the forgiveness of sin and Christ’s Body and Blood that breaks this boy’s heart so that he believes and is freed from the curse.

But he is the only one of siblings who did.

Do you think a curse is not laid upon such a household? I do. But that curse is because of the poisoned environs of that household and not the sins of the father being counted against the children. Rather the sins of the father were TAUGHT to the children, and the children grew up believing the lies until they believed nothing.

I hope the distinction is clear.

God Bless

the quotes from Eph 2 and Romans 8 are concerning unregenerate man, obviously the power of God’s gospel is for the salvation of humankind, including the hypothetical young man saved from a situation which is too frequent to be unlikely.

this however, is the state in which we find ourselves born.

Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) maintains that all is futile and Romans 8 assures us that this state of futility will continue until the final consumation. we are naturally bad, following the passions of our mind and the lusts of our flesh but because of God’s grace we are brought from death to life. This is why we still need confession, though we have passed through the laver of regeneration.

 

[PumpkinSeed]

God did not create Adam and Eve with a “weakness to give into sin”. Rather he created them with free will, and with their own free will they gave into sin. Only AFTER they had fallen were they deprived of the will to always do good under all circumstances. This is what is meant by “weakening of the will”. We no longer want to always do what God wants, but want to do what we want all too often. To cross God’s will even once is too often, but you get the point.

But falling into sin, and giving into temptation is a sign of weakness. If we were not weak individuals, we would not have ever been tempted to fall into it. If you are strong enough to say no then it wouldn’t of happened. Sin is not about power, its about weakness, so naturally we are weak enough to give into it. To fall into it.

 

[Della]

But falling into sin, and giving into temptation is a sign of weakness. If we were not weak individuals, we would not have ever been tempted to fall into it. If you are strong enough to say no then it wouldn’t of happened. Sin is not about power, its about weakness, so naturally we are weak enough to give into it. To fall into it.

No. God would not create beings incapable of following his commands and then punish them for just being what he made them. That’s what you are accusing him of, unintentionally, I assume. God is fair and right in all he creates and does. Adam and Eve didn’t have to give into temptation. They could have resisted.

The Virgin Mary is a good example of this. She was preserved free of the stain of original sin from the moment of her conception, which means she had the same innocence as Eve when she was created. I rather think Mary was also as intelligent as Eve–her words certainly support that she was. She sat and listened to the reading of the Torah and the Prophets and heard the rabbis talking about the expected Messiah. She was prepared to receive or reject whatever God might ask of her. Instead of saying “no” to God, as Eve did, Mary said “yes” when she said to the Archangel Gabriel, “Be it done unto me according to your word.” Mary was not weak, but strong because she believed God’s word. It was not any innate weakness that caused the fall of man but rather pride and disobedience.

 

[bogeydogg]

ok, my misunderstanding was due to the fact that the philosophical backgrounds of Augustine and Aquinas are totally different.

Augustine was born into a neoplatonic world just as we are postmodern, Aquinas was using a aristotelian worldview.

To ask then, whether Augustine was more faithfully followed in his “Christian Platonism” by Aquinas or Calvin would definately have Calvin as the closer in worldview.

Yet to announce that they were simply using the Platonic construction without critique of that system is not correct, Augustine was converted to Christianity (similarly to Justin Martyr) after a long philosophical pathway (inspired by Cicero). Calvin was well entrenched within the Christian humanist renaisance and his first commentary was on Seneca (a stoic).

not that Christianity cannot use the prevailing worldview to better explain its purpose for being, Platonist, Aristotealian, Modernist and even postmodern are merely systems of thought - Vatican II is a good example of using critical historical method and socialogical thought to explain the source of Revelation in Christ (cf the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation).

to pit platonic structure against others would be to deprive Western Christendom of even the “Doctor of Grace”, Augustine.

I am not saying that we should whole cloth pay zero attention to Plato or Aristotle and neither would Augustine or Thomas and certainly not Justin Martyr say that either. But we must always remember to treat these things within the context of the philosophies of man are foolishness because of the Wisdom of God far surpasses them all.

So in so far as Plato’s teachings coincided with right doctrine Augustine was not ashamed to use them and the same holds true for Thomas and Aristotle, but neither of those men held these two thinkers to be on par with Scripture and both men venerated Scripture in a way which is foreign to most of us today. So while we should not eschew all philosophical thought (with the possible exception of postmodernism which I think is completely incongruous with Christianity) we should not try to hold them above the Bible, the traditions of the Church or the writings of the great Catholic teachers like Augustine and Thomas and Anselm. Because these men had a right way up style of thinking which is far better emulated than anything written by Plato, Aristotle or Cicero.

God Bless

 

[PumpkinSeed]

No. God would not create beings incapable of following his commands and then punish them for just being what he made them. That’s what you are accusing him of, unintentionally, I assume. God is fair and right in all he creates and does. Adam and Eve didn’t have to give into temptation. They could have resisted.

The Virgin Mary is a good example of this. She was preserved free of the stain of original sin from the moment of her conception, which means she had the same innocence as Eve when she was created. I rather think Mary was also as intelligent as Eve–her words certainly support that she was. She sat and listened to the reading of the Torah and the Prophets and heard the rabbis talking about the expected Messiah. She was prepared to receive or reject whatever God might ask of her. Instead of saying “no” to God, as Eve did, Mary said “yes” when she said to the Archangel Gabriel, “Be it done unto me according to your word.” Mary was not weak, but strong because she believed God’s word. It was not any innate weakness that caused the fall of man but rather pride and disobedience.

No, adam and eve were weak. Apparently they did what anybody else would of done which means that we are a fallen and weak people. For example I could say that if I was in eves position I would not have listened to the snake. But somebody else would say, ‘yes you would have because what adam and eve did is what anyone would do’. Well right there basically says that yes, we are weak. Thats how we naturally are.

 

[Della]

No, adam and eve were weak. Apparently they did what anybody else would of done which means that we are a fallen and weak people. For example I could say that if I was in eves position I would not have listened to the snake. But somebody else would say, ‘yes you would have because what adam and eve did is what anyone would do’. Well right there basically says that yes, we are weak. Thats how we naturally are.

No. That’s simply not the case. Adam and Eve didn’t need to give into temptation. They were perfect–they had no excuse–that’s why it’s called sin. If someone does something out of mere weakness that is called a flaw not a sin. They broke faith with God out of disobedience not out of weakness. There have been others less perfect who were sorely tempted down through history that didn’t sin. Weakness is not admissible in this case.