Original Sin

I am planning to teach a course centered on the tragic dramas enacted in Athens in the fifth century BCE, but with very few of them surviving in manuscripts into the modern age, there are certainly not enough to form very coherent generalizations.  Still we can talk about the ancient notion a "tragic sense of life," reflected in the story of the Iliad, and how that view is other than the Judaeo-Christian notion of original sin.  The Genesis story of Eve's disregard of the Lord's prohibition on eating fruit from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil set in motion a series of rejections and human disgrace which is often simply labeled Orginal Sin.  "In Adam's fall we sinned all," as the old saying goes.  God's covenant with mankind expressed in Yaweh's announcement to Noah that there will never be another flood is not so powerful an expression of divine concern as the later pronouncement by Jesus and his followers that He promises eternal life to all those who will believe in him.  Original Sin is an idea that is in strict contradiction to the ancient Greek notion of having to explain misery and evil doing.  They were more in the vein of Dick Cheney's "these things happen."  When Herakles is driven  mad by the goddess Hera so that he kills his children, the explanation is that this is still another manifestation of her insane jealousy of his mother whom her husband had impregnated.  Divine malignancy, then is the answer to this horrible tragedy.  Nowadays when a human father does such a thing, non-believers will look for pathologies in the perpetrator's brain or some other medical circumstance, and Christians will see this as yet another expression that man is inherently sinful and prone to breaking the laws of God with the right provocation.  Human misery is sometimes a lot more bearable when it is clear that there is a cause, even if it is divine action, the will of god.  Human beings "matter" in this view of things.  Sometimes world events are so awful that this view becomes difficult to sustain, the horrific events known as the Holocaust, for example.  Sometimes the Greeks flatly stated that such things were the due to the gods, for no reason particularly, other than inherent divine malignity.  It is comforting for some persons to know that the misery they suffer is in no way caused by them.  It would be nice if the finger-pointing, holier than thou, well to do citizens of our communities would not so often assume that the poor and homeless are what they are because it is "their own fault."  There is the underlying notion of "original sin" perverting their human judgements.  It is always dubious to ascribe God's will to any act; better to remember the Lord speaking out of the whirlwind in Verse 100 as I remember it in Job, rebuking those trying to "understand" Job's plight, thundering out "Were you there when I created the world?" in effect, lay off, you know nothing.