The concept of Original Sin stems from the myth of the separation of Man from God, as described in the story of the Fall from the Garden of Eden. Most cultures have a similar myth to this Judeo-Christian story, and all are an attempt to explain how Humanity became separated from his Divine and Eternal nature.
When Adam and Eve eat from the apple of the Tree of Life, they are beiginning the journey of Understanding and Self-Knowledge. This act is a positive and necessary act, and yet has been perceived by the theology of organized Religion as a negative act, and therefore a Sin.
Holy Roman Catholic theologian Saint Augustine developed these ideas further during the formative years of the Church. In his early years, Saint Augustine had himself been a member of a Gnostic Christian ecstasy cult called Manichaeism that was widespread throughout Europe at this time, and was founded by the prophet Mani in the third century. The teachings of this cult included sexual ritual and ritualized "possession". By the time Augustine switched his allegiences to the Roman Catholic Church, Manichaeism had nearly as many followers as the orthodox Church, and was seen as a very real threat to Rome. Augustine spent his life intellectually attacking and demonizing the ideas and practices that he had once followed.
Central to Augustine's new concepts was the idea of "Original Sin". He argued that Original Sin was a literal and incurable disease that was passed to each child through the very act of sexual intercourse that had conceived the child. Thus, Original Sin was an incurable sexually transmitted disease. However, the Church also claimed to have the invisible cure to this invisible disease. Through the act of Baptism, the first stage of the treatment is applied. The child will be safe if he or she continues to follow Church dogma and partake of its necessary Sacraments, which are a continuation of the treatment. Weekly doses of the "Holy Spirit" through the Mass and Holy Eucharist, as well as regular Confessions of one's current Sins, both literal and imagined, ensure a clean medical record is maintained. Sex must be avoided at all costs as it is the ultimate regression into the state of Original Sin. As women were the "temptresses" of the all-male priests and theologians, they too were seen as dangerous contributors to the spread of Sin and Disease.
This concretization of Original Sin as a literal disease is the root of racism within the Roman Catholic Church. Those who did not accept Baptism and enter the Church were now harborers of a deadly sexually transmitted disease. From this time onwards Jews throughout Europe, who by nature of their culture and religion had not been baptised, were feared and victimized as carriers of Original Sin. During outbreaks of very real disease such as Bubonic Plague, Jews were massacred and burned for having spread the disease.
A similar attitude was taken to Native Americans first encountered in 1492. These unbaptised indigenous people were accused of introducing the sexually transmitted disease syphilis that ravaged Europe until the discovery of penicillin. Indeed, the current scientific belief states that no cases of syphilis had been encountered in Europe up until this time, whereas a single skull of a Native American girl with characteristic jaw-bone deformation is seen as evidence of one born with syphilis. However, the prominent "Pompeii syphilis" case has been largely ignored by the scientific community. The famous volcanically preserved bodies of Pompeii include two victims with prominent pelvic bone deformation, a tell-tale sign of prolonged genital syphilis. It is ironic that it is the Native American population who are blamed for a fatal incarnation of Original Sin, when it was these same people who were the innocent victims of European smallpox, measles, influenza, mumps, scarlet fever, diphtheria and plague, which ultimately claimed as many as 250 million indigenous people in the "New Worlds". As a German missionary testified in 1699 "The Indians die so easily, that the bare look of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost".
In fact, syphilis was historically embraced by the Roman Catholic Church as evidence of God's support of their theories of Original Sin. In 1826 Pope Leo XII banned the use of condoms because they prevented "the immoral evildoers from suffering diseases as are the just punishment for their Sin". The current AIDS pandemic has been perceived in a similarly perverse moral way. Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church continue to outlaw and fervently oppose the use of life-saving condoms throughout the world. Like Baptism's purification of Man's Original Sin, they claim that only they have the invisible cure to this incurable disease. If one joins the Church and accepts their dogma, one will refrain from having sexual intercourse, therefore avoiding the inevitable consequences of God's wrath. Abstinence from sex and sin is the only way not to catch a fatal sexually transmitted disease and die of Original Sin.
If we return to the Garden of Eden and investigate the true meaning of the act of the eating of the apple of knowledge and its consequences, we will see that the sex act is in fact far from being a sin of any kind. Adam and Eve live in a state of innocent perfection within the Divine realm of Unity in the Garden. However, like children they are unconscious of their particular and special individuality as "created by God" and are therefore impotent of their own God-like individual self-expression and creativity. They enjoy the garden but add nothing to it, and are not responsible for it. By eating the apple of knowledge they begin to become aware of their individuality. This starts them on a journey of Self-Discovery through the suffering of loneliness and lack of unity with each other and with God. Through the act of sexual intercourse Adam and Eve are ritualistically re-forming themselves as the unified pair of opposites that they originally perceived themselves to be. Like the journey of the child through to adulthood, as individuality is more deeply perceived and felt as separation, sexual desire is increased.
Thus, the act of sex far from being negative or evil, as perceived by the Roman Catholic Church, is in fact Humanity's most fundamental way of saying "I am lonely and I want to experience you".
This is the only pathway back to the Garden of Eden where individuality and unity are the perfect expression of the Divine.
Ironically, it is known by historians that the Jesuit educated Adolf Hitler was convinced that the slight deformity of his penis (his urethal orifice opened around the back of the gland) was genetically inherited syphilis. In this paranoid delusion he reasoned that his ailment was entirely the fault of unbaptized Jews, who harbored sexually transmitted "Original Sin" in the form of syphilis.
Clearly, the dogmatic teachings of the Roman Catholic Church are leading Humanity away from the Garden of Eden, and into the repressed abyss of loneliness, fear, and insanity.
