I'm not sure if people here are saying you're born "evil".....I think evil and sin can have different meanings.
Yes, I see your point. I was responding to someone who averred that people were born evil. In the context of the discussion, I assumed the poster equated the concept of original sin with the idea that people are born evil. I was concerned to put that issue to bed.
What I question is the concept itself. It was accepted for a long time that sin was inherited because of an act of disobedience by the then (literal) Adam and Eve. Now because archeology refutes Adam and Eve being the fist man and woman it appears the concept has shifted thinking....by viewing it as the "community" has the propensity to commit sin...striving to be like God. IMO....(notice I said IMO)...I find it fascinating that throughout the bible these two are viewed as literal beings, described as literal beings and even their genealogy gives credence to them being literal. From the beginning of the book all the way to Paul, Adam was viewed as the "one" being responsible for the sins of all humanity. The bible is explicit on this.
No, the bible is not explicit on this. The bible says that we have inherited our tendency to sin from Adam. Humanity is "in Adam," which is to say "dominated by their tendency to sin and the spirit of the age, the devil." All humanity shares in this tendency, which has been inherited from their parents all the way back. The point is that every single human being ever born is subject to this tendency. But, and this is crucial, Adam, however we understand Adam, is not "responsible" for our sins if we mean "culpable". He's not going to get blamed for my sins, for instance. On the other hand, he's responsible in the sense that he started this ball rolling. If Adam hadn't done whatever he did to infect all humanity with this condition, we wouldn't have come to this pass. (Of course, we must allow that somebody sometime might have started that ball rolling later eventually; in fact, that's probably guaranteed to have happened -- who knows?)
In one commentary you said Luke, when describing the genealogy, got it wrong. Does this also apply to Paul? He and Luke, being friends, believed the same thing. Talk of sin being inherited seems to debut in the teachings of Paul in his letters...Does this mean that his view on original sin was incorrect as well? If they were both incorrect from the get go what else did they get wrong?
Yes, if they conceived of Adam as a single human being, I propose that they simply got it wrong. I don't believe in biblical inerrancy, especially on empirical matters. So what else did they get wrong? Dunno. I know the OT classifies bats as birds.... But seriously, I acknowledge the thin-edge-of-the-wedge argument you're deploying here. But it seems I have no choice -- given what we've learned about our origins from science -- but to regard the biblical creation story as some sort of poetic representation of the truth. The original authors may have thought they were recording actual historical events more or less as they happened. I don't know their mind. However, if that's so it turns out their wrong, and as a person who regards the biblical text as authoritative, I've got to deal with that. And so this is my attempt to do so, with all the worries and problems that entails.
"The body of people" who author doctrines, is itself a doctrine that can be varied in its understanding.