”We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.”
The thing about the second article of faith that I always valued was its concept of justice. Being punished for someone else’s sins could never be just. This is why I was so dismayed when I realized that the Atonement is built on the opposite principle. It is a reversal of that justice.
When I was a believer, I explained the injustice away with cosmic language like “a great and last sacrifice.”
I viewed sin in a cosmic fashion.
Sin was an action that needed correcting. But it was also an actual thing—an entity. I saw it like one of Plato’s archetypes in his World of Forms. For Plato, this world was a shadow of another, more real world.
We understand the world through abstractions. But in reality, there are no actions disconnected from entities. You can’t have running disconnected from someone or something doing the running. And you can’t transfer the running to someone else. (See video in comments)
In the same way we can never transfer the consequences of our actions to anyone else. And I believe that we pay a real-world price for believing we can.
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