All the Suffering in Your Life Traces Back to Your False Belief in Original Sin
The good news: Christian Science destroys the false narrative and affirms your origin as God's highest idea 💡
YOU WERE LIED TO IN SCHOOL
If you’re actually in school you may just want to cover your eyes for the next few sentences…
Here are a few mistruths you believed at some point in your life:
Christopher Columbus discovered America. False. There were indigenous people there thousands of years before 1492.
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. It’s complicated. They essentially freed themselves.
Bats are blind… you only use 10% of your brain… George Washington had wooden teeth… Albert Einstein failed math, etc. All false.
Truth-adjacents and outright lies have been baked into the American educational system since the beginning; some to conceal nefarious acts, some to fit a status quo narrative, and some harmless little alterations.
But there is a BIG lie outside of traditional education that has unquestionably shaped how you’ve viewed yourself over your life. In your understandable ignorance, you probably attributed all the physical and emotional pain resulting from this unconscious indoctrination, to merely the general rollercoaster ride of a hardscrabble life.
The indoctrination?
That you came from dust.
This false dust-origination aka “original sin” — peddled over centuries by unenlightened Bible scholars — is why you’ve seen yourself, to varying degrees, as flawed and undeserving for most, if not all, your life.
A quick note before we take the plunge: Though I recommend reading this in one sitting, I wrote it to fundamentally serve as a “true creation/true you” study-bible to which you are welcome to return.
All God-fearers have a choice which creation they accept:
The Spiritual Creation (Genesis 1)
The Material Creation (Genesis 2+)
You may think you believe in both, but mixing them is spiritual error. You’re a Mets fan, or a Yankees fan; if you’re drinking 100% pure water from the Swiss Alps and a contaminant finds its way in, you are no longer drinking 100% pure water. The tiniest of mixes instantly makes the spiritual material. If you believe in the spiritual creation, the material is entirely false; if you believe in the material creation, the spiritual is entirely false. I think I’ve made my point.
Copious debate exists about who wrote the book of Genesis. Since no one knows for certain who wrote what or when, at the end of the day our confidence in truth doesn’t rest on theories about authorship, but what rings true to our individual paths.
It is this author’s unreserved view, however, that in order to advance spiritually in the way Jesus intended us to advance, there should be no uncertainty in which creation a life should be rooted.
Here are my starting declarations:
God (via Moses) inspired Genesis 1: The Spiritual creation
Scholars (not God) wrote Genesis 2+: The Material creation
And a brief summary of the two:
Genesis 1 (spiritual creation) — God created the heaven and the earth; plants and creatures; man in His image and likeness; all “very good.”
Genesis 2+ (material creation) — God created Adam and Eve; man suffers from original sin; God has human qualities and is both good and evil.
To begin to understand the provenance of your personal suffering and to learn how to be free of it, it’s important to know the truth about the alleged “original sin” found in the material creation:
It was a deception popularized by Christian leaders in the 4th and 5th-century (about 200 years after Jesus).
These leaders were essentially “repackaging” to the public what the original writers of Genesis 2+ branded into Scripture around 1400 BC.
The creators of Genesis 2+ were the original “original sin” guys. They needed a theory to explain the evil that seemed to exist and persist in the world. They reasoned: All this pain and suffering HAD to be God’s will.
So they devised a yarn where God creates Satan a perfect angel, then He creates the physical world, man comes along and corrupts it, Satan turns into the Devil, God gets flustered and destroys everything he created except for a guy named Noah and his family. A bunch of other things happen where God does good and evil things to various people and lands.
What the Old Testament scholars embarked on was an innocent endeavor — trying to make sense of what they felt about their surroundings at such a primitive time. But the existential damage it ended up wreaking on global collective psyche ever since has forever tainted self-worth. At least until Mary Baker Eddy showed up.
SIDE NOTE: Imagine how different our world would be if those early Old Testament writers had reasoned spiritually instead of materially; if they had been preoccupied with good rather than evil. Might the entire fabric of our universe be different?
Anyway, the Bible-reading public of the day ultimately embraced their Shakespearean narrative because materiality — original sin and God being good and evil — has in every age been viewed by the mainstream as more merited, more marketable, and all around more “entertaining” than spirituality.
It’s obvious to common sense which creation reeks of fiction.
The reason the material creation of Genesis 2+ feels “off” to seekers of Truth, is because, without any logical explanation, it reverses course and suddenly elects evil as more real than good — in the spiritual creation of Genesis 1, it was the opposite: good was the sole reality of existence.
But there was hope in proximity.
The iconoclast Socrates, who lived in Greece around 400 BC — about 1,000 years after Genesis was written and about 400 years prior to Jesus — held close the spiritual creation of Genesis 1. He spoke of God being the eternal source of everything good, and the immortality of man.
Socrates was so certain of his understanding of the superiority and immortality of good, that as he sat in prison drinking the hemlock poison, he knew it wasn’t the end.
A few hundred years after Socrates came Philo of Alexandria, a Roman philosopher who lived in the early part of the 1st-century, when Jesus walked the earth. Like all philosophers of the day, Philo presented both sides of the creation, but he had more to say about the spiritual one.
Philo affirmed a God that had no physical features or emotional qualities. He believed God had no contact with evil, didn’t even know what evil was, and was immutable. He even equated matter to nothingness and believed it caused the “discord and decay of things.”
Twenty years after Philo came a kindred theologian named Marcion of Sinope, who also stood firmly on the spiritual creation. He held St. Paul in great esteem, a resounding indication he represented true Christianity.
Marcion compared the god of Genesis 2 with the god of Jesus. The god of Genesis 2, he asserted, created the material universe and punished mankind for its sins; the god of Jesus, the true God, was a god of compassion and love, who governed humanity with benevolence and mercy.
For the next 300 years, the spiritual creation seemed to be the most believed account of humankind’s identity. Spiritual healing — rooted in the spiritual creation — taught by Jesus and furthered by his disciples and the apostles, continued consistently, bolstered by the aforementioned spiritual-minded thinkers (Socrates, Philo, Marcion and others).
But it changed dramatically in the 4th-century, when Christian thinkers like St. Augustine of Hippo emerged.
While he did believe in a God who was good, he ALSO believed in the reality of original sin — that we were born of dust and doomed to corrupt. He coined the term “inherited guilt” which he said came from Adam's disobedience and was transmitted through sexual reproduction.
Being an extremely influential theological voice, St. Augustine essentially singlehandedly moved the needle of credibility back to the material creation.
A few hundred years after Augustine, in the 13th-century, another influential thinker emerged, an Italian priest named Thomas Aquinas. He ardently furthered the “dust” rationale.
Between Augustine, Cyprian, Aquinas and other biblical materialists, Genesis 2 became the creation everyone was forced to accept. It didn’t matter if you only believed in the spiritual one — that virtually every Christian leader of the time was pushing for the mixing of the two, the average believer had no other choice but to be indoctrinated into believing everyone for eternity would be born broken and therefore doomed for corruption.
So for the next few centuries, an anthropomorphic god who arbitrarily acted like a petty, spiteful human was accepted by the masses and infiltrated into the fabric of culture and society.
Mary Baker Eddy to the Rescue
But in the 1800’s — around 3,000 years after the Old Testament writers first introduced the manmade concept of “original sin” — an American woman named Mary Baker Eddy showed up affirming Genesis 1 as the only true account of our forever identity. No, God is not both good and evil, not both material and spiritual, he is 100% good, and 100% spiritual.
The spiritual creation was the inspired Word of God; the material creation was the uninspired word of creative writers.
A lot of smart people listened to her, like Albert Einstein and Mark Twain.
Mrs. Eddy eventually gave to the world a discovery she called Christian Science — the divine Science imbued in Genesis 1, and the Divine Laws explaining how Jesus healed sin, disease, and evil.
Every believer today who reads the Bible spiritually owes her endless homage for restoring Scriptural Truth, and for showing — proving — suffering didn’t come from God but from the human mind.
Her Herculean persistence has inspired millions of people in all corners of the globe awakening to the fact that they weren’t actually born in sin after all — they were perfect, immortal ideas of God that no amount of “matter and evil” in the world could ever alter.
The Adam-Dream
“The parent of all human discord was the Adam-dream,” Mrs. Eddy writes, “the deep sleep, in which originated the delusion that life and intelligence proceeded from and passed into matter… man was not created from a material basis; his province is in spiritual statutes, in the higher law of Mind.”
In the latter pages of her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mrs. Eddy (as she’s affectionately known by supporters), provides overflowing insight into the contradicting creations.
Part of what had always worked against Genesis 1’s staying power was its brevity:
“The living and real prelude of the older Scriptures is so brief that it would almost seem, from the preponderance of unreality in the entire narrative, as if reality did not predominate over unreality, the light over the dark, the straight line of Spirit over the mortal deviations and inverted images of the creator and His creation.”
There is little debate among theologians that the Adam and Eve narrative is allegory, meaning it never happened. Mrs. Eddy had no qualms with allegory, as she cited many that give us valuable perspective: Noah, helping us understand God as shelter, Job, knowing undying faith, Jonah, displaying God’s mercy and forgiveness…
But the allegory of Adam and Eve was false, she asserted, did nothing for the human race, and in fact did more damage to human psyche than any other doctrine ever created. The abrupt and deceitful switch in tone and detail from the spiritual perfection of Genesis 1 to the material imperfection of Genesis 2, is jarring and almost surreal — and points to dramatic falsities by writers drawn more to fantasy than Truth.
Would a good and perfect God really curse a perfect world as a judgment for the sin He never created?
If, as Mrs. Eddy says, “The highest ideas are the sons and daughters of God,” in other words you and me, then does God really consider the dynamic duo who is winning at sinning part of that highness? The logic would be laughable if it weren’t divinely insulting.
She reasons:
“Does God create a material man out of Himself, Spirit? Does evil proceed from good? Does divine Love commit a fraud on humanity by making man inclined to sin, and then punishing him for it? Would any one call it wise and good to create the primitive, and then punish its derivative? We must admit that God will not punish man for doing what He created man capable of doing, and knew from the outset that man would do. God is ‘of purer eyes than to behold evil. We sustain Truth, not by accepting, but by rejecting a lie.”
“Nothing sensual or sinful is immortal,” she states.
In the spiritual creation, God says, “Let there be light.” What followed was, of course, light. But Mrs. Eddy points out that this light God generated was before there was even a sun:
“Solar beams are not yet included in the record of creation, still there is light. This light is not from the sun nor volcanic flames, but is the revelation of Truth and of spiritual ideas. Was not this a revelation instead of a creation? Geology has never explained the earth’s formations. It cannot explain them.”
She makes clear which provenance stands on Truth:
“The science of the first record proves the falsity of the second. If one is true, the other is false, for they are antagonistic. The first record assigns all might and government to God, the second chronicles man as mutable and mortal, as having broke away from Deity and as revolving in an orbit of his own. Existence, separate from divinity, Science explains as impossible.”
And more divine logic:
“Objects utterly unlike the original do not reflect that original. Therefore matter, not being the reflection of Spirit, has no real entity.”
Mrs. Eddy reminds us that in Genesis 1 (26-27), it is no mistake that man’s reflection of God is mentioned twice in back-to-back verses:
“To emphasize this momentous thought, it is repeated that God made man in His own image, to reflect the divine Spirit.”
She maintained that the central fact of the Bible is the superiority of spiritual over physical power. Her point wasn’t that spirituality is more powerful than physicality, it was that spirituality is in actuality the only power. Jesus, of course, proved her correct.
Mrs. Eddy writes of God resting on the 7th day: “God rests in action. Imparting [bestowing] has not impoverished, can never impoverish, the divine Mind.”
A Genesis 1 summary:
“Here the inspired record closes its narrative of being that is without beginning or end. All that is made is the work of God, and all is good. We leave this brief, glorious history of spiritual creation in the hands of God, not of man, in keeping Spirit, not matter — joyfully acknowledging now and forever God’s supremacy, omnipotence, and omnipresence.”
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (John)
The EXACT Bible Verse Where it Goes From Truth to Lie
In Genesis 2:6, the Bible says, “There went up a mist from the earth…”
Mrs. Eddy says this mist marks the precise moment the inspired Word ends, and the false depiction of man as fallen and God as both good and evil, begins.
“A knowledge of evil was never the essence of divinity or manhood,” she writes. “In Genesis 1 evil has no local habitation nor name. Creation is there represented as spiritual, entire, and good. No one can reasonably doubt that the purpose of this allegory — Genesis 2 — is to depict the falsity of error and the effects of error. Subsequent Bible revelation is coordinate with the Science of creation recorded in Genesis 1. Inspired writers interpret the Word spiritually, while ordinary writers interpret it literally. Literally taken, the text is made to appear contradictory in some places, and divine Love, which blessed the earth and gave it to man for a possession, is represented as changeable.”
Her definition of Serpent:
“Subtlety; a lie; the opposite of Truth, named error; the first statement of mythology and idolatry; the belief in more than one God; animal magnetism; the first lie of limitation; finity; the first claim that there is an opposite of Spirit, or good, termed matter, or evil; the first delusion that error exists as fact; the first claim that sin, sickness, and death are the realities of life. The first audible claim that God was not omnipotent and that there was another power, named evil, which was as real and eternal as God, good.”
Mrs. Eddy also notes that throughout Genesis 1, God is naturally called “God.” But starting at Genesis 2:4, God is suddenly referred to as “Lord God,” and soon after “Jehovah,” terms innocuous in and of themselves, but clear indications of human manipulation.
While Genesis 1 speaks of God making “every plant of the field before it was in the earth,” Genesis 2 speaks of the “Tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” The latter basically says life comes from matter, contradicting Genesis 1:
“Here is the emphatic declaration that God creates all through Mind, not through matter — that the plant grows, not because of seed or soil, but because growth is the eternal mandate of Mind. Because Mind makes all, there is nothing left to be made by a lower power.”
When God warns Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil, Mrs. Eddy says:
“Here the metaphor represents God, Love, as tempting man; but the Apostle James says, ‘God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man.’”
To Adam naming all the animals, Mrs. Eddy says:
“Here the lie represents God as repeating creation, but doing so materially, not spiritually, and asking a prospective sinner to help Him.”
The Genesis of Christian Science
Mrs. Eddy spends nearly 60 pages analyzing the two creations and planting her feet solely on Genesis 1 as our only true origin. I’ve copy and pasted a few more inspired passages from Science and Health, sans my commentary.
“In the second chapter there is an attempt to trace all human errors directly or indirectly to God, or good, as if He were the creator of evil. The allegory shows that the snake-talker utters the first voluble lie, which beguiles the woman and demoralizes the man. Adam, alias mortal error, charges God and woman with his own dereliction, saying, ‘The woman, whom Thou gavest me, is responsible.’ According to this belief, the rib taken from Adam’s side has grown into an evil mind, named woman, who aids man to make sinners more rapidly than he can alone. Is this an help meet [suitable mate] for man?”
“The name Adam represents the false supposition that Life is not eternal, but has beginning and end; that the infinite enters the finite, that intelligence passes into non-intelligence, and that Soul dwells in material sense; that immortal Mind results in matter, and matter in mortal mind; that the one God and creator entered what He created, and then disappeared in the atheism of matter.”
“Eve’s declaration: ‘I have gotten a man from the Lord,’ supposes God to be the author of sin and sin’s progeny.”
“The mythological theory of material life at no point resembles the Scientifically Christian record of man as created by Mind in the image and likeness of God and having dominion over all the earth. Did God at first create one man unaided — that is, Adam — but afterwards require the union of the two sexes in order to create the rest of the human family? No. God makes and governs all.”
“Whatever indicates the fall of man or the opposite of God, or God’s absence, is the Adam-dream, which is neither Mind nor man, for it is not begotten of the Father.”
“The mind supposed to exist in matter or beneath a skull bone is a myth, a misconceived sense and false conception as to man and Mind. When we put off the false sense for the true, and see that sin and mortality have neither Principle nor permanency, we shall learn that sin and mortality are without actual origin or rightful existence. They are native nothingness, out of which error would simulate creation through a man formed from dust.”
“The human form, or physical finiteness, cannot be made the basis of any true idea of the infinite Godhead. Eye hath not seen Spirit, nor hath ear heard His voice.”
“From the first to last the supposed coexistence of Mind and matter and the mingling of good and evil have resulted from the philosophy of the serpent. Jesus’ demonstrations sift the chaff from the wheat, and unfold the unity and the reality of good, the unreality, the nothingness, of evil.”
“Darkness and doubt encompass thought so long as it bases creation on materiality… all must be Mind, or else all must be matter. Neither can produce the other.”
“When the mist of mortal mind evaporates, the curse will be removed which says to woman, ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ Divine Science rolls back the clouds of error with the light of Truth, and lifts the curtain on man as never born and as never dying, but as coexistent with his creator.”
“The true theory of the universe, including man, is not in material history but in spiritual development. It is this spiritual perception of Scripture which lifts humanity out of disease and death and inspires faith.”
“It is false to say that Truth and error commingle in creation. Disputing these points with the Pharisees and arguing for the Science of creation, Jesus said, ‘do men gather grapes of thorns?’ And Paul asked: “What communion hath light with darkness?”
“The only excuse for entertaining human opinions and rejecting the Science of being is our mortal ignorance of Spirit, — ignorance which yields only to the understanding of divine Science, the understanding by which we enter into the kingdom of Truth on earth and learn that Spirit is infinite and supreme.”
“If in the beginning, man’s body originated in non-intelligent dust, and mind was afterwards put into body by the creator, why is not this divine order still maintained by God in perpetuating the species? Has man sought out other creative inventions, and so changed the method of his Maker?”
“Genesis and the Apocalypse seem more obscure than other portions of Scripture, because they cannot possibly be interpreted from a material standpoint. To the author, they are transparent, for they contain the deep divinity of the Bible.”
“Matter has no life to lose, and Spirit never dies. A partnership of mind with matter would ignore omnipresent and omnipotent Mind. This shows that matter did not originate in God, Spirit, and is not eternal. Therefore matter is neither substantial, living, nor intelligent. The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind, — that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle.”
“It is essential to understand, instead of believe, what relates most nearly to the happiness of being. To seek Truth through belief in a human doctrine is not to understand the infinite. We must not seek the immutable and immortal through the finite, mutable, and mortal, and so depend upon belief instead of demonstration, for this is fatal to a knowledge of Science. The understanding of Truth gives full faith in Truth, and spiritual understanding is better than all burnt offerings.”
“By interpreting God as a corporeal Saviour but not as the saving Principle, or divine Love, we shall continue to seek salvation through pardon and not through reform, and resort to matter instead of Spirit for the cure of the sick. As mortals reach, through knowledge of Christian Science, a higher sense, they will seek to learn, not from matter, but from the divine Principle, God, how to demonstrate the Christ, Truth, as the healing and saving power.”
In Conclusion
“For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” -1 Corinthians
And here we find ourselves full-circle. The current rise in materialism, especially in America, seems to have shifted the balance back towards the material creation. But the good news is, Mary Baker Eddy existed. And she was bold and wise enough to spend her long life writing it all down and perfecting Science to completion.
Mrs. Eddy’s skeptics must also know she was a Christian through-and-through. She never claimed innovation; merely rediscovery.
Here’s a statement she made that should fill you with the hope and joy of being a part of the correct creation:
“When we wake to the truth of being, all disease, pain, weakness, weariness, sorrow, sin, death, will be unknown, and the mortal dream will forever cease.”
It’s important to know Mrs. Eddy wasn’t merely throwing out radical claims for attention or provocation — her entire life was spent proving them. She healed hundreds of people in her life using Science, from depression, to broken limbs, to cancer, not to mention thousands of healings recorded by everyday people in the last 100 pages of Science and Health.
You probably weren’t aware that no religion has a more extensive public record of healing than Christian Science.
There’s been a disheartening epidemic of cursory Google searches of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science, leading to hapless researchers being hoodwinked by the same old misunderstandings, distortions and myths peddled for over a century.
While we know this is how history works whenever a figure like Mrs. Eddy shows up challenging the status quo and telling the truth, it has only served to prolong Science’s unending telephone game, and frankly removes from earnest seekers the potential of discovering the purity and perfection of Science itself. If you get nothing else from this series I hope it’s the inspiration to favor deep, cogent dives, over shallow, careless hops.
Let’s assume you came into this entry skeptically, and now you’re at least open to considering Christian Science’s view of the true creation.
Reflecting back on your life, if you had believed that your true and sinless origin was in Genesis 1, and you affirmed that truth whenever you were caught in a situation you were impelled to think wrongly of yourself or of others, do you think your life would have been different?
I’ll leave you with this: In Genesis 2:21, it is written that God “causes a deep sleep to fall upon Adam.”