Original Sin?

Being preached the notion of "original sin" as a child in religious education classes in primary school never made much sense to me, "the sins of the father..." etc, but after reading biologist  
Lyall Watson's excellent and thought provoking book I now get the feeling that there is something to the theory of "Original Sin", but it's something that will take a little more than Holy Water on the head to overcome, as it's the inherent nature of our genetic defaults that we must sometimes battle to do good rather than the evil our genes would have us do that makes the idea of original sin seem a valid point.
To make an analogy imagine being born a vampire with a genetic lust for blood.

To do "good" and live among humans you would have to constantly battle your genetic urges to stick your fangs into people's necks ... so the war between good and evil tendencies in such a vampire trying to behave would be a constant mental battle between his will to do right and his genetic makeup for bloodlust.
Maybe that's a bit of an extreme example, but I find this mythological picture below quite symbolically true when you think of genes looking like entwined snakes (the serpent in the tree?) and the apple being the forbidden fruit of knowledge.
As "souls" coming into this material world as human beings we are nailed to that genetic tree through our inheritance of our parent's genes that go right back millions of years, so with the fruit of knowledge to do right in one hand and the serpentine genes of the primitive on the other, it can be a constant battle to do the right thing as long as we inhabit a human body.  

Lyall writes about Richard Dawkins theory of the meme as a cultural virus, and since we all share genes going all the way back to the beginning it is not hard to imagine the "biological internet" that Lyall writes about in this passage -

"We live in extraordinary and fascinating times, poised on the brink of something either too wonderful to imagine or too terrible to contemplate. Probably, given what we know of life, a bit of both. But the mix remains vital and possibly still within our powers to control. What worries me most is that we have an alarming tendency to tilt the balance in the wrong, the ugly way. How else can one explain the fact that mass murderers have now become cult figures celebrated in an unsavory market of killer kitsch? Of trading cards, posters and T-shirts that promote such adulation of serial killers that Ted Bundy even found one groupie credulous enough to marry him. Man-eating Jeffery Dahmer, until his own murder in a Wisconsin prison in late 1994, was showered with fan mail and thousands of dollars in gifts. Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker" who savagely murdered thirteen people in California, even now has a devoted following of women who write to him and even visit him in San Quentin. And there are those who have begun to turn to Charles Manson for advice.

Explore#originalsin

Some of the attention is inevitable. We have always enjoyed flirting with danger, scaring ourselves with the possibility of pacts with the devil and dances with werewolves. In a way, such perversity is even healthy. It helps to remind us of who we are, and of the risks of becoming the Other. But by fanning the flames of Hell we are giving life to a truly errant meme and flirting with real problems. I don't know if Robert Thompson saw Chucky's video, and I doubt that Eric Smith ever heard of James Bulger, but such direct influence may no longer be necessary. I suspect that there is a biological version of Internet to which we all subscribe, and there may now already be enough bad news in the air to infect anyone, anywhere, at any time."

Original Sin by ChrissieCool

Lyall Watson

I think that Lyall Watson was ahead of his time and that his books are as relevant today as when he wrote them.

And I find it amusing that this passage from his book starts on page 237, of all pages -

Room/page 237?!

"Ever since there were humans, there have been human desires. These differ from culture to culture, but the one fact common to all people everywhere is that nobody's desires are ever completely satisfied.

We always want more. More food, more land, more women, more children, more power, more respect, more money, more freedom - whatever. And as each desire is temporarily sated, the need transfers automatically to another kind of hunger. In most other species, needs are constrained by ecological realities and though competition persists, communities settle into more or less stable sets of relationships. Humans changed all that by turning natural needs into more disruptive "wants" and set in train our most universal characteristic, a tendency to disturb the ecology by trying to control it to our own advantage.
Our first attempts were probably directed at increasing productivity, and took the form of projecting our own internal desires onto the external world."   

Supernature Syncs
"It is the genes that "want" men to have sex with as many women as possible. Sex and power are the nuts and bolts of natural selection. We are designed to seek ephemeral pleasures, to believe that just one more million, the next lover, one last drink for the road, will bring everlasting bliss.

"Natural selection," says Wright, "has a malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying 'Just kidding'." And the force which drives into illicit pleasures and hides behind the guises of temptation is clearly identifiable now as one whose interests are served by practices which may no longer be appropriate for us.
Our old ally, the selfish gene" 

The cell-fish gene?!:-)

?

The African Queen

Charlie Allnut: What are you being so mean for, Miss? A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it's only human nature.

Rose Sayer: Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.