https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Hjn3Oj74Zuc
The way to understand it is to clearly differentiate between sin and death. They’re related but they’re different. And so in Scripture it says the wages of sin is death, right? And there’s an idea that even in the Scripture it never says that we inherit the sin of Adam. It says that because of Adam’s sin we are in death. Like we are living in a world of death. And that’s really the best way to understand it, which is that sin causes death. So you have a purpose, you miss the mark, and that’s what death is. And so there’s a brokenness. The system breaks down as you miss the mark. And this happens at every level of reality, whether it’s in your own life or in society or the entirety of the world. When something misses the mark then there’s a breakdown which happens. Now we inherit the breakdown of that which is before us. We inherit death. So we are born in families that have missed the mark. We are born of parents that have missed the mark. We are born of systems that have missed the mark. And so because of that we live in a world which has an aspect of it which is broken. We still have the aspiration of hitting the mark. And that’s what kind of guides us and makes us want to live. But we have to live with the consequences of that miss. And the difficulty is that when you’re in a world of death, that is when you inherit the consequence of sin, so when your parents miss the mark, and they will, and we know they do, you inherit that and it makes it more difficult for you to hit the mark. Because you have all the baggage which comes and you have inherited the patterns of being that will make that worse, which will increase the brokenness, which will tend to fragment. And so that’s the manner in which we need to understand original sin. That’s what it is. It’s the inheritance of brokenness. I hope you take this as a helpful thing. That to me reminds me of certain interpretations of the Buddhist notion of karma, that there are these patterns at work and we inherit them. And they affect our behavior and they cause suffering. And the way I sort of understood this, at least psychologically and existentially, is as you said, we pick up from others, our parents, our friends, and our culture, we pick up and here’s where historical racism does matter. We pick up patterns that are shaping us and moving us in ways that are detrimental to our aspirations. Is that a fair person? Yeah, exactly. But the idea is of course the very desire, the very aspiration, that is the very possibility we have of conceiving the good and of seeing the point that we’re aiming at, of seeing it in our view and moving towards it, is the very, how can I say this, is the reminder that we don’t fit in this broken world, that we find dissatisfaction in the brokenness. So that’s what causes our suffering, but it’s also what can ultimately cause our hope, because we can see that we’re not made, like there’s something in us which wants more than this brokenness and this world of death. There’s something in us which can see that which we can aim towards, and which is the good, of course. And so that is really the, and so what, let’s say what Christianity shows us, and like what Christ shows us is that the manner to reach the, the manner to reach the aim in the brokenness is to a certain extent embrace death. And that’s really the, that’s the hardest thing, is to embrace death consciously, embrace the brokenness consciously, and therefore we don’t become slaves of that brokenness, right, is to see your sins, to see the place where you missed the mark, instead of just blaming your parents, because that’s what you will want to do, right? You want to blame your parents, you want to blame the system, and you’re right to, because the system is broken, your parents are broken, everything, there’s an aspect of everything that’s given to you which is broken, not fully, but there is an aspect of it which is broken, and the solution is to, is to actually rather see your own death, the places in you that you’re, that you’re dead, and recapture the vision, right, recapture the aim.