Down with the Sickness

One of the biggest things that has always bothered me about Christianity/Judaism is the idea that I'm paying for the actions that some foolish man made tens of thousands of years before I was born.  It seems unfair and ridiculous.  As time has passed I've had the sin problem explained to me, and it has made sense, but then I lapse back into the thought that surely this whole thing is just not fair.  And God is just after all, right?  Last night, my dad was mocking the idea and, as usual, I found myself struck dumb in intimidation.  This nagging annoyance in the back of my mind that maybe this sin thing is just pure injustice.

But then today, it occurred to me that such a thing is really not all that ridiculous at all.  It's like a sickness.  You may not be the carrier, but someone else's actions can give you the disease, whether you deserve it or not.  A woman who has AIDS or Herpes or something can give it to the child that is inside of her.  An innocent child.  Infected with this poison before it could even take a breath.  It's still innocent, but now its infected, and as it grows it will have the disease.  Sin is an infectious disease.  It's in our DNA.  It's been passed down for millenia.  It kills us in the end. 

On Revenge last week, the main character said something about forgiveness being granted, but we still have to live with the consequences of our sin.  That's exactly true.  You can be forgiven for having sex before marriage and having a baby with some loser, but the consequences of raising the child and dealing with the dead-beat-dad are still there.  You have to live with the consequences of your actions.  And often times, those actions hurt other people.

Adam's rebellion, he and Eve deciding that there was something better than God, deciding to try to be gods created this disease.  Their discontentment (grass is greener and all that), their choice, their listening to lies, their pride, bringing poison into a world that had never seen it before was so incredibly horrific that it ripped nature, the universe apart.  And we've been living in the aftermath of that ever since.

Hiroshima, Japan.  Before and after the American bombing.

~

PS. I've been so very busy with school lately. All that bureaucracy is a killer! Teaching is pretty time consuming too. Excited for the Protestant Reformation tomorrow (entire thing taught in two days)

PSS. Too many people around me are currently pregnant or just became parents.  This has led to an alarming amount of mornings where I wake up from a vivid dream to remind myself that I am not in fact pregnant, nor do I have any little person to breast feed.  I know you wanted to know.