Our bodies were designed by The Creator with all physical deliberate working parts. We do not carry around superfluous parts (even the appendix has a purpose). So, how can it be that we were all born with the unavoidable flawed red mark of what the Church teaches is Original Sin on our blank slate? This is an insult to God and a dangerously spiked thread spun 'round and 'round parishioners like a spider's web. (A snippet of this farce can be read below.)
The concept of Original Sin was a fairy tale dreamt up by a man whose conscience got the better of him. A man who projected his insecurities onto the world by conjuring up the idea of Original Sin. You see, Augustine felt such guilt about the way that he lived that he arrogantly assumed that what is good for the goose is good for the whole damn flock. If he was going to punish himself by labeling his feelings as sins, then everyone else had to be labeled as well. He tried to make himself feel better by bringing everyone "down to his level". It is textbook psychology and an easily deconstructable piece of nonsense the Church passes off as The Word.
In talking about such defined sins, the Church also introduced the so-called "7 Deadly Sins" (wrath, sloth, lust, greed, envy, pride and gluttony). They preach that the sin is not just in the action, but in the feeling prior to the action. One can feel and fight acting on those bad feelings, but, alas, the damage has been done and the sin has already been logged in the book. Forget about the fact that one triumphed, overcoming their feelings and gained control of themselves so as to not act on their bad feelings. Sorry, you get no credit for that. The Church would say "not good enough - you shouldn't have felt the sin to start with". The Church has designed this game so that you cannot win...requiring the Catholic to put on the cloak of guilt...every...single...day. And, of course, guilt will always bring you back to church. Guilt is a handy tool of control and the Church wields it like no other weapon imaginable.
On a natural biological level, one needs to feel anger for fight or flight, one needs to feel lust for reproducing, etc. These are aspects of survival and God designed us as a species to survive...which is why we were equipped with such feelings. Superfluous and sinful? I think more utilitarian and necessary in God's plan. So, in essence, to the Church, being human is ONE BIG SIN in itself if you go by these standards. Because, after all, what does it mean to be human? It means that you will feel all of these "sins", along with many other feelings less definable ALL THE TIME. Take away the feelings in a human and all you have is a meaningless shell. This is what the Church wants: An easily programmable ask-no-questions shell. A mechanical and unfeeling function of duty to serve the Church. I say the "Church", because Jesus Christ issued no decree on Original Sin or The 7 Deadly Sins. Why, even Jesus Christ himself exhibited one of their ridiculously termed "7 Deadly Sins" -- anger -- in the temple -- toward the moneychangers. Jesus was also tempted by Satan in the desert. The Bible does not state that he felt absolutely no temptation whatsoever, it states that he was tempted (a sin?) but he fought the bad feelings and won. If this is the end-all-be-all stance of the Church's view of sin, then they successfully labeled their God a sinner. Blasphemy!
St. Augustine & Original Sin
Source: Wikipedia.org
As a youth Augustine lived a hedonistic lifestyle for a time and, in Carthage, he developed a relationship with a young woman who would be his concubine for over fifteen years. During this period he had a son, Adeodatus, with the young woman. During the years 373 and 374, Augustine taught grammar at Tagaste. The following year, he moved to Carthage to conduct a school of rhetoric there, and would remain there for the next nine years. Disturbed by the unruly behaviour of the students in Carthage, in 383 he moved to Rome to establish a school there, where he believed the best and brightest rhetoricians practiced. However, Augustine was disappointed with the Roman schools, which he found apathetic. Once the time came for his students to pay their fees they simply fled. Manichaean friends introduced him to the prefect of the City of Rome, Symmachus, who had been asked to provide a professor of rhetoric for the imperial court at Milan.
At Milan, his mother Monica pressured him to become a Catholic. Augustine's own studies in Neoplatonism were also leading him in this direction, and his friend Simplicianus urged him that way as well. But it was the bishop of Milan, Ambrose, who had most influence over Augustine. Ambrose was a master of rhetoric like Augustine himself, but older and more experienced. Augustine's mother had followed him to Milan and he allowed her to arrange a society marriage, for which he abandoned his concubine (however he had to wait two years until his fiancée came of age; he promptly took up in the meantime with another woman). It was during this period that he uttered his famous prayer, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet" [da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo] (Conf., VIII. vii (17)).
In the summer of 386, after having read an account of the life of Saint Anthony of the Desert which greatly inspired him, Augustine underwent a profound personal crisis and decided to convert to Catholic Christianity, abandon his career in rhetoric, quit his teaching position in Milan, give up any ideas of marriage, and devote himself entirely to serving God and the practices of priesthood, which included celibacy. Key to this conversion was the voice of an unseen child he heard while in his garden in Milan telling him in a sing-song voice to "tolle lege" ("take up and read") the Bible, at which point he opened the Bible at random and fell upon the Epistle to the Romans 13:13, which reads: "Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying" (KJV). He would detail his spiritual journey in his famous Confessions, which became a classic of both Christian theology and world literature. Ambrose baptized Augustine, along with his son, Adeodatus, on Easter Vigil in 387 in Milan, and soon thereafter in 388 he returned to Africa. On his way back to Africa his mother died, as did his son soon after, leaving him alone in the world without family.
Augustine struggled with lust throughout his life. He associated sexual desire with the sin of Adam, and believed that it was still sinful, even though the Fall has made it part of human nature. In the Confessions, Augustine describes his personal struggle in vivid terms: "But I, wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, 'Give me chastity and incontinence, only not yet.'" At sixteen Augustine moved to Carthage where again he was plagued by this "wretched sin": There seethed all around me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and I hated safety... To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness.
For Augustine, the evil was not in the sexual act itself, but rather in the emotions that typically accompany it. To the pious virgins raped during the sack of Rome, he writes, "Truth, another's lust cannot pollute thee." Chastity is "a virtue of the mind, and is not lost by rape, but is lost by the intention of sin, even if unperformed." In short, Augustine's life experience led him to consider lust to be one of the most grievous sins, and a serious obstacle to the virtuous life.
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