Original Sin. The song by Elton John (love the song BTW) alludes to original sin being sex related, a theory I've also heard tossed about in religious circles. But that doesn't make any sense. For one thing, animals have sex- they were told to-'go forth and be fruitful and multiply'. Animals can't sin, right? Also, what would be the point of making male and female humans if they couldn't have sex? :-/ No, the original sin must have been something peculiar to humans, something that animals haven't taken on.

Other circles teach that the original sin was when Eve ate the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a version which follows the bible more closely. But you know, my goats get into forbidden fruit trees all the time, so again, I don't see how this could be taken literally and as something that only humans do. What happened when Adam and Eve ate the fruit? They were self aware- they realized that they were naked, and for the first time, they felt guilty. Prior to the forbidden fruit incident, they had frolicked in the garden and didn't have to work. They just harvested what grew naturally. Afterwards they worked, developed culturally, and civilization came into being. For all practical purposes, Adam and Eve before the 'fall' were animals, not people as we think of them.

I happen to think that the legend is an allegory, not a blow by blow account. That the fruit wasn't a literal apple, but rather the step from living as foraging animals to developing self awareness and looking towards the future and creating things. Was this a sin? It certainly complicated matters for homo sapiens. Morality and ethical behavior came into being; with animals, there is no ethical behavior; there are good manners and bad manners (which are punished), there is an instinctive system for each species, but not morals as we think of them, rather, survival of the fittest (remembering of course, that the fittest is not necessarily the largest or strongest, but simply the most fit for its environment.)

As I see it, the original sin wasn't a sin at all; it was just a step in the development of man that changed life dramatically both for him and the other species. This is consistent with the notion that we are all born with 'original sin', unlike the doctrine that somehow, since Adam and Eve ate apples a long, long time ago, every baby is sinful from the time of it's birth and will be punished by going to hell if it doesn't say the right prayer or join the right church.