I am presently creating a series of reflections around the understanding of the word “sin.” I think the concept of original sin has been deeply misunderstood and has caused untold suffering. When people ask, “What is a sin in Christianity,” the answers they encounter are often framed in moralistic or juridical terms—rule-breaking, inherited guilt, or a stain passed down through generations—yet this framing may say more about later theological anxieties than about the heart of the gospel itself.

In its earliest and most experiential sense, sin does not name a moral failure so much as a distortion of relationship: a loss of alignment with Divine life, a turning away from Presence, a forgetting of who we are and where our true home lies. Rather than describing humanity as fundamentally corrupt, the language of sin in the Christian tradition can be read as diagnostic rather than condemning, illuminating the ways fear, separation, and false identity obscure our natural capacity to live from LOVE. When original sin is understood as meaning that something is wrong with us at our core, instead of describing a shared human sense of separation, Christianity becomes about shame and being rescued, rather than waking up and coming home—and that change has hurt many people over time.

This misunderstanding was not abstract for me; it shaped my own life and faith in painful ways. For more than fifty years it damaged my relationship with the teachings of the Master Jesus, because in my upbringing in Northern Ireland the recognition of oneself as a sinner was treated as the very foundation of what it meant to be a Christian. I could never reconcile this with the simple and radical claim that God is Love, and so I eventually left, not because I had stopped seeking God, but because I had to look for God beyond a framework that felt rooted in fear and self-rejection. What finally taught me the true meaning of “sin” was not theology or doctrine, but direct encounter: a lived revelation of the Nature of God, where grace was not an idea but an experience, and where I came to understand in my own life what Paul the Apostle meant when he wrote, “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

For those who have never had a direct encounter with the ground of Being pointed to by the word God, the idea of sin is usually taught as a moral failure of behaviour, with redemption framed as the effort to improve or correct that behaviour. Yet moral behaviour has never been fixed or universal; it was once considered acceptable, even righteous, to own slaves, to deny women any voice or authority, to persecute those of different beliefs, and to use violence in the name of God, all of which are now widely recognised as profound moral failures. If sin were simply a matter of behaviour, then morality itself would be the measure of truth, endlessly shifting with culture and time. This is the version of sin upheld by many who claim authority within Christian teaching, yet such an understanding can only arise in the absence of direct encounter with Divine LIFE, because it reduces sin to surface actions while remaining blind to the deeper reality it points toward—a state of inner separation that no moral effort alone can heal, and which can only be resolved through awakening to that LIFE which lies beyond the experience named by the word “sin.”

Over time, Christianity shifted its centre of gravity away from the lived teachings of the Master Jesus and toward a framework dominated by sin and redemption, a shift that did not come from Jesus himself but from later theological interpretation. The idea of original sin, as it came to be formalised through thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo, reframed human nature as fundamentally flawed from birth, in need of rescue rather than awakening. Yet this stands in stark contrast to the voice of the Master, who offered no doctrine of inherited guilt but instead issued a simple and radical invitation: “Unless you become as little children, you will not enter the Kingdom.” There is no trace of original sin in that call—only innocence, openness, and trust. Jesus did not point toward shame or corruption at the core of our Being, but toward a way of seeing and living that recovers what is already present before fear and conditioning take hold. I find it impossible to reconcile a theology rooted in suspicion of human nature with a teacher who placed childlike innocence at the very threshold of the Kingdom, and so I choose to receive the Master’s teaching as a call to return to innocence rather than to submit to theological constructions born of the carnal mind.

To understand how the doctrine of original sin took shape, it is necessary to look honestly at the inner world of Augustine of Hippo himself. Augustine was a man of profound spiritual longing, but also of deep inner conflict, particularly around desire, self-control, and the divided will, and it was through this personal struggle that he came to interpret the human condition. Unable to reconcile his own experience of inner fragmentation with the innocence he encountered in the gospel, he concluded that something must be fundamentally disordered in human nature itself. What Augustine experienced inwardly as compulsion, shame, and loss of freedom was gradually universalised into a doctrine, transforming a personal psychological struggle into a cosmic inheritance passed down through generations. In doing so, sin ceased to describe a lived sense of separation and instead became a condition stamped onto humanity at birth, long before choice or awareness. This move quietly shifted Christianity away from the Master’s invitation to childlike openness and trust, and toward a worldview shaped by fear of the body, suspicion of desire, and the need for control—an interpretation born not from direct encounter with Divine LIFE, but from an unresolved inner conflict projected onto the human story itself. At the heart of the Master Jesus’ teaching lies a far deeper understanding of the word sin than moral failure or wrongdoing, and a simpler word that points more clearly to its meaning is separation. Beneath all beliefs, doctrines, and behaviours, there lives in almost every human being a quiet but persistent sense of being separate—separate from God, from others, from life itself—and this feeling operates whether it is consciously named or not. Yet any direct encounter with the ground of Being pointed to by the word God reveals something unmistakable: this sense of personal separation, though deeply felt, is not ultimately real. In the experience of union with the Divine there is no distance, no division, no exile—only Presence and belonging. Sin, in this light, is not a crime to be punished or a flaw to be ashamed of, but the ongoing maintenance of the belief in separation, and while it carries no moral guilt, it does give rise to suffering, fear, and the sense that life is small, fragile, and limited. The invitation of the Master is not to moral perfection, but to awakening—to release the illusion of separation and to live from the wholeness that has always been quietly waiting beneath it.

his page is an opening into a wider contemplative exploration of The Forgiveness of Sins—a series of reflections that re-enter the meaning of sin beyond fear, moralism, and inherited shame, and return instead to relationship, Presence, and awakening to Divine LIFE. Each reflection approaches the word “sin” not as condemnation, but as a signpost pointing toward the healing of separation and the recovery of our original belonging.

If you are reading on a larger screen, you are invited to scroll back to the top of the page and explore the reflections listed in the sidebar, allowing your own questions to guide you. If you are reading on a mobile device, simply continue scrolling down to move through the series in sequence. There is no required order—only an invitation to read slowly, inwardly, and in the spirit of return rather than correction.