I guess according to the new site rules, I should declare that this answer is derived from common Protestant interpretations of the King James Bible. I then extend into some programming analogies where I may lose people, these are my own attempt to convert these basic, commonly held Protestant theological ideas into a form that might make understanding easier to grasp for a certain type of person.
You're talking about two completely different things, the English translation and titles man has made up (like Original Sin) are responsible for confusing the issue. The passages you cite refer to personal sin committed by already spiritually dead people. It's spelling out that the blame for that sin lies squarely with the person who committed it. God isn't looking to throw the blame and consequences of your sin on your kids. That much is clear. Note that in this context, God is speaking to spiritually dead people. This is important, more on that following.
However, the fall of mankind (female and male human) is something else. God told Man (note Man here is not a man, but is an object composed of two nested objects, female and male, Adam and Eve) that on the day that they disobeyed God's command and ate from the Tree of the Knowledge Of Good And Evil, they would surely die. There's a double meaning here, spiritual death and physical death.
Genesis 2:15-17 KJV
15 And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden
to dress it and to keep it.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the
garden thou mayest freely eat:
17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not
eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely
die.
The tree of course contained the knowledge of Good and Evil, blessing and calamity, something mankind did not possess and therefore as children, were innocent. Taking from this fruit not only was a sin because they disobeyed a direct command from God, but it also fundamentally changed the composition of humanity. God is a programmer, you're a programmer and so I am, so I'm going to use some programming pseudo talk to illustrate these points.
Mankind before taking the fruit and inheriting its properties Genesis 2:25 KJV:
And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
And After Genesis 3:10-11:
10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid,
because I was naked; and I hid myself.
11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of
the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
Clearly now, mankind was aware of all the perversion that can be made out of nakedness, they were self conscious, etc. Completely different than 5 minutes ago. Man has been rewritten and inherited a class God never purposed them to inherit, and lost the inheritance they once held from God, as this inheritance was commanded to change to death the very moment that they inherited this other, forbidden class.
Mankind now exists in a state separated from God, something that cannot be simply reversed. God already commanded that they would get death (both spiritual and physical), so irrevocably, this is what they're going to get. The class that made man compatible with God is dead, the destructor has run, there's no turning back. God doesn't even recognize these objects has His own anymore, as the typeof == assert fails.
Genesis 3:15 KJV
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Right here God is illustrating that mankind is now a child of Satan, because man obeyed Satan rather than God, inherited this new structure and they are both now derived from a common type. When God says "her seed", he's referring to Christ, not human beings. This is another meaning here, it's the first Prophecy of the coming Christ, because it's Christ who will give a new nature compatible with God's. The other meaning of course is that if her seed is Christ, then who is his [satan] seed? This perverted form of humanity. More on that later, but Jesus confirms this while on Earth.
John 8:44 KJV Jesus Says:
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will
do.
When speaking to the public. This is the difference between the so called "Original Sin" and already spiritually dead people sinning and not having the consequences put on their children. This same difference is the precise reason for the need for Christ. Humanity and every single clone of it since this fall has been composed of this broken, incompatible design and needs to derive a new Nature from a type compatible with God.
Trying to stay on topic, in the meantime, spiritually dead (meaning they're dead to God, no spiritual life is in them, incompatible with God) are still capable (actually more capable) of sinning. God in His mercy gave the Law as a system by which mankind could battle against this new nature, and though no man (except Christ to come) could ever truly fulfill this Law and be counted Righteous in his own right, God made provision for man to have righteousness imputed upon them and the judgement for their sins to be withheld or transferred. People who spurned this show of mercy were of course to come under total judgement and inherit the full measure of the consequences of their sin. This is what the passages you reference speak of, that the perpetrators get it, not the children.
Despite all of this mercy, mankind still had this inherited nature of death that simply could not be reconciled with God's own nature. They are opposites, one representing all that God is against. When the destructor on manObject->MortalCoil
is called, there's nowhere in God's domain to store what it contains, since all of His collection's Add<T>
methods have the where T SpirituallyAlive
, plus a bunch of other runtime checks against properties like HasSin
.
Mankind needs to inherit SpirituallyAlive
from a new source, and have HasSin
flipped. God wants that, wants to afford every opportunity for that to happen. People only look at the parts where God is dealing out Judgement in the Bible, and decide God is mean. If you look at the whole picture, as I've touched on a bit, there's actually a lot of mercy. A lot. Being that God is merciful, judgement isn't going to be dolled out to kids just for who their parents are. Even God booting Adam and Eve out into the suffering of the world was actually mercy, because:
Genesis 3:22-23 KJV
22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to
know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also
of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to
till the ground from whence he was taken.
as you can see in 22, there was a second element man could stretch forth his hand and take from, the Tree of Life. Notice How God doesn't even finish the sentence, because inheriting this object after having inherited the knowledge of evil, forcing their state to spiritual death, MortalCoil
would have been promoted to a static constant member, locking man in this fallen state eternally, irreconcilable to God. This would have been an unspeakable tragedy.