Flawed, no. I’m happy with who I am and the actions I take. I don’t live up to what I know I can become sometimes but that hardly means I feel that I’m intrinsically flawed in some manner.
And maybe that’s the crucial point: Christians believe they are carrying around the ecclesiastical baggage of something that supposedly happened thousands of years ago. I don’t believe in that so I’m not carrying around any baggage. I live for this world only and on my own merits. I don’t need to be ‘born again’ to feel clean; my moral worth is based solely on my own actions.
And what was this ‘original sin’ in the first place. It wasn’t just defying God’s orders; it was doing it to obtain knowledge. Why worship a God who would punish all of humanity for that?
This sincerely surprises me. I would have thought anybody could see that every human being has flaws --- intellectual blind-spots, a capacity for cunning self-deception, drives and appetites which dominate our thoughts to an unreasonable extent, ten thousand individuals' flaws which melt together in the crucible of politics and aggregate into Pharaohism or Czarism or Stalinism or (gosh, those are too obvious) even the ceaseless bickering of faculty rivalries or the underhand cruelties of ugly marriages.
This goes beyond apish instincts or animal behavior. Animals don't do this. Not one of them would make a flambe of Nanking or Nagasaki or claw into their own wombs to rip out their young. There is something wrong with human beings in particular. Isn't it obvious?
I don't think what happened in terms of an inherited flawed nature (which is what Original Sin means) was punishment as much as it was consequence. Punishment would have been allowing these two spoiled people, A-Dumb and Naive, to have exactly what they wanted: Knowledge without Wisdom, Loyalty, or Trust. (I mean, think of it: they already knew Good. Their only "gain" was they got to know Evil. And in doing so, betrayed and wronged their greatest Friend, the One who had already given them all Good. How smart is that?)
It was sheer mercy that they lost their preternatural gifts. With knowledge but without wisdom, loyalty or trust, they would have made existence sheer hell for each other --- and no escape!
But God has a plan. Turn the page...
...And here we are: we're in the midst of it. The Predicament. A grand fight. A grand drama. Lord of the Rings times six billion.
Wonderful as a myth, hey? And even better because it's true.