A note to readers: I wrote this article while working through the religious teachings that shaped my understanding of what it means to be human. Some of the language reflects the theological framework I was using at the time. Today, I would place less emphasis on finding the right interpretation of a Bible verse and more on the question beneath it: What happens to a person who is taught that being human is evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with them?
Rejecting that belief does not mean pretending we are harmless or avoiding responsibility for what we do. It means recognizing that shame is not the foundation of a humane or accountable life.
There’s nothing wrong with you.
Yes, I realize no one is perfect, we have our good days and bad days, and we’re all a little neurotic here and there. Lemony Snicket said it well:
“People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”
When I say “there’s nothing wrong with you” what I mean is that at the most fundamental level of what you are, you’re not depraved. Despite the pointing finger of religious condemnation, you are not a sinner. You were not born bad.
One of the greatest lies propagated by religion upon humankind is that being human is a condition to overcome, disease to be cured, blight to be forgiven, and the reason for estrangement from God. Contrary to the pop-Christian “gospel”, you don’t need saved from yourself.
Today I am beginning a new series: “The Top Most Abused Bible Verses”. The first Bible verse is one commonly used to argue the so-called doctrine of “total depravity”, which states that each of us are born with a fallen nature. For 2,000 years religion has been rubbing people’s noses in the false idea of their original badness. Perhaps no other biblical teaching has inflicted more psychological harm upon humankind.
The doctrine of original sin has caused significant psychological, theological, and social harm. It promotes inherited guilt, shame-based identity, and distorted views of human nature.
We are going to do a little theology here.
The doctrine of original sin was heavily shaped by a mistranslation of Romans 5:12 in the Latin Vulgate, where the Greek phrase “ἐφ’ ᾧ” was rendered as “in whom” instead of “because”.
The history of original sin involves centuries of interpretation, theological debate, and translation. One influential passage is Romans 5:12, which describes sin and death entering the world through one man, Adam.
The Greek phrase at the end of the verse, ἐφ’ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον, is rendered in many modern translations as “because all sinned.” The Latin wording available to Augustine included in quo, which he understood to mean “in whom”—that is, in Adam, all sinned. That reading supported Augustine’s view that Adam’s descendants inherited a sinful condition and were implicated in his sin. mdpi.com
Church father ** Augustine of Hippo **gave the doctrine of original sin a formulation that profoundly shaped Western Christianity. He also connected its transmission to sexual reproduction, an association that contributed to the long history of Christian anxiety and shame surrounding human sexuality.
Augustine’s views influenced later church teaching, including decisions at the councils of ** Carthage** and
Other Christian traditions have understood the consequences of Adam’s story differently. Eastern Orthodox Christianity, for example, generally emphasizes that humanity inherits mortality and corruption rather than personal guilt for Adam’s act. Even within Western Christianity, there are differences in how original sin and inherited guilt are understood.
The translation and interpretation of Romans 5:12 remain subjects of debate. But the distinction matters: a statement that people have sinned is not necessarily the same as a claim that every human being enters the world already guilty.
Here’s an alternative way of understanding this verse.
The correct translation of Romans 5:12 is:
“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men,
becauseall sinned.”
Metaphorically, “because all sinned” in Romans 5:12 suggests that each person reenacts Adam’s fall. Meaning, each of us experiences a rupture in our relationship to life, which we discover through our human agency. The human condition involves all the choices we make that corrupt what is good, cause suffering, and prevent flourishing.
Sin here is not just a bad act, it’s a cosmic fracture in relationship, trust, and harmony. We all experience this, not because we inherited a sin nature, but because we all do what Adam did. “Sin” in a collective pattern we participate in, not a passive condition we’re born into.
Humanity doesn’t just inherit Adam’s guilt—we ritualize his rebellion. Each act of selfishness, fear, or disconnection echoes Eden’s rupture. “All sinned” becomes a metaphor for how we confirm the fracture through our own lives. We reenact the myth of separation, choosing autonomy over communion. Sin is not just a moral failure—it’s a metaphor for existential estrangement. We all experience the tension between longing for connection and choosing isolation.
You could refer to this as the “Adamic rupture”. It refers to the symbolic break introduced by Adam’s disobedience, marking the loss of innocence, the entrance of death, and the beginning of existential estrangement from life’s harmony. It’s a mythic metaphor for the human condition: fractured, mortal, and in search of restoration. We don’t inherit a sin nature, but we confirm the rupture through our own choices. It frames “sin” as a collective pattern we participate in, not a passive condition we’re born into. It’s not an offense against “God” but am offense against life. It’ doesn’t bring separation and estrangement from a supreme being in the sky, but between one another, all living things, and the gift of life itself.
The symbolic and metaphorical meaning of Romans 5:12 includes:
⚡Loss of relational integrity: Humanity moves from communion to concealment—hiding from God, blaming each other, and fearing creation.
⚡Exile as archetype: The expulsion from Eden becomes a metaphor for existential exile—our longing to return to wholeness.
⚡Death as disconnection: Not just physical death, but the death of innocence, trust, and unity.
I created the below diagram to show different views on the Adamic Rupture:
The Adamic rupture metaphor encodes several ruptures:
⚡ Separation from nature: Eden represents harmony with the more-than-human world; exile marks the beginning of dominion and alienation.
⚡ Loss of embodied innocence: Shame around nakedness introduces dualism—body vs. spirit, purity vs. sin.
⚡ Patriarchal hierarchy: The myth establishes gendered blame and divine punishment, reinforcing control and submission.
⚡ Epistemic control: Eating from the Tree of Knowledge is framed as transgression, casting curiosity and autonomy as sinful.
The Adamic rupture can be seen as a mythic metaphor for existential awakening: the moment we become aware of mortality, separation, and the loss of innocence. Healing, then, is not about returning to Eden but integrating the rupture—honoring the grief of exile while cultivating new forms of belonging.
Post-religious rewilding is a symbolic, ritual, and psychological movement that seeks to:
🌱 Restore intimacy with nature: Through ecological practices, animist frameworks, and multispecies ethics.
🌱 Reclaim embodied spirituality: Honoring ** interoception**, somatic wisdom, and ritual rooted in the body.
🌱 Decolonize inherited myths: Rewriting origin stories to center mutuality, curiosity, and pluralism.
🌱 Heal epistemic harm: Validating intuitive, ancestral, and experiential knowledge systems.
In the remaining of this article I want to address the second Bible verse most used to teach the original sin doctrine - Romans 3:23, “For we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
With over 5 billion copies sold and distributed, the Bible takes the top spot as the most read and widely distributed book in the world. My academic background is in theology. I studied the Bible in its original languages, learned from some of the world’s leading theological scholars, and for many years taught the Scriptures. Despite all this, I discovered after leaving religion that my interpretation of the Bible was subjective. During my deconstruction process, the discovery of ** Modern Biblical Criticism** (and
People will often say, “My authority is the Bible.” It would be more accurate for them to say, “My authority is what they told me at church the Bible means.” That’s not meant to be snarky. It’s just the reality of it. The same could have been said of me: my authority was what they taught me in seminary the Bible meant.
There has never been a singular or unified interpretation of the Bible. The question is always how one should interpret it, for which there are many answers depending on who you ask. Even before a single verse in the Bible is read, there is the matter of what interpretive approach (** hermeneutic**) should be used, and how it is properly applied. An obvious example would be whether Old Testament stories such as creation, the Fall, Noah’s ark and Jonah and the whale, should be taken literally or figuratively.
There are more than 45,000 Christian denominations globally, all following their own understandings of the Bible. As a seminary student I was confident in my interpretations of the Bible under the illusion of doing “exegesis”, which is allegedly rooting the correct meaning out of a Bible verse through an objective analysis of the text. It wasn’t until later upon realizing that I was mostly doing “eisegesis”, which is projecting bias and presuppositions into the text.
Perhaps the most fundamental presupposition people bring to the Bible is their idea of what the Bible even is or meant to be. Some of those varying views include that the Bible is…
the revelation of the one true God
the theological foundation for the doctrines of the Christian faith
the inerrant, infallible and sole message of God to humankind
God’s blueprint for daily living
the foundation for morality and ethics
authoritative answers to life’s existential questions
a literary anthology of varied literary genres, touching upon many themes related to religion, philosophy, human nature and ethics
a bunch of made-up hogwash, manufactured by religious men to control people
Most orthodox Christians would be agreeable to the first six ideas about the Bible, while #7 would be embraced by progressive or liberal Christians, and #8 by the hardcore unbelieving skeptic.
I previously wrote an extensive article on the Bible, ** The Bible After God**. I won’t repeat here what was written there. I identified fourteen factors that influence what one comes up with from the Bible.
Throughout history there have been varying views on what the Bible teaches, even the most fundamental doctrines associated with the Christian faith. The idea that there is an enduring core theology that is accepted as “Christian” is not true. What is “biblical Christianity” to one person is not to another. In previous Substack articles, I have covered many different versions of “biblical Christianity” ranging from ** Christian Theism** to
My appreciation for the Bible has exponentially grown in my post-religion life, but for completely different reasons than my former Christian ones. People are putting the pieces together differently in the construction of their non-religious spirituality. You can believe in God but not be a theist, ascribe significance to Jesus but not be a Christian, appreciate the Bible but not believe it is the only or absolute truth. I write about these dynamics in my article, The Either/Or Problem with God.
It is a dark stain upon the Christian religion that the Bible has been used to rationalize the world’s worst horrors, including:
slavery
white supremacy
genocide
war
religious intolerance
victimization of the gay community
oppression of women
opposition to scientific progress
… to name a few.
On a more personal level, a significant aspect of my professional work over the last three decades has been counseling people in recovering from toxic religious indoctrination from the misteaching of the Bible.
I don’t necessarily think that re-interpreting or re-framing the Bible is the best pathway forward for people who have left religion and working their deconstruction process. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to what one does with the Bible after leaving Christianity. In general I find three camps:
The Bible Reclamation Camp
This camp asserts that the Bible doesn’t really mean what is commonly taught, and we should reinterpret it to mean something better.
The Bible Concession Camp
This camp concedes that the Bible means what is commonly believed and we should accept the Bible as ancient literature, take from it what we will, and stop trying to facelift it.
The Bible Transfiguration Camp
The Bible contains profound and liberating truths that require a person to explore deeper than the common understandings that have been handed down through the institution of the Church.
Many people who are damaged by toxic religious indoctrination may never want to crack open a Bible again. In my view, it’s a personal choice. Constructing a meaningful spirituality may or may not include the Bible. I have written several articles about the process of religious deconstruction in articles such as, ** I Thought I Was Leaving a Religion **and
The ultimate authority of one’s life is not the Bible or any sacred writing. The highest truth is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside oneself. One’s ultimate authority is the voice of truth within one’s own innermost being.
I titled this series, “The Top Most Abused Bible Verses”. This is a subjective list. There are countless Bible verses that have been taught in ways that deeply damage people. Whose to say what the “top” abused verses should be? It depends on who you are. For example, Bible verses that are mistaught to oppress women would likely be near the top of a woman’s list, while Bible verses weaponized to condemn the LGBTQ+ community would especially be on their list. For this series, I chose ten verses that have commonly come up in my deconstruction work with others.
I can’t possibly go into every detail for each of the Bible verses I am covering in this series. My plan is to summarize how, in my view, each of these verses are mistaught, and then offer an alternative way of understanding them.
Someone might ask: “But Jim, how do you know your understanding or interpretation is the correct one?” Great question! In my second book, , I share my creation of the “freedom filter” in my post-religion life to determine the veracity of anything I heard or read relating to God. Jesus said that truth sets you free. If I hear or read something that induces fear, oppression or shame, I reject it. But if it evokes in me peace, liberation or well-being, I offer a posture of curiosity and openness toward it. Walt Whitman wrote, “Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.”
I’m not saying that my “freedom filter” is a superior hermeneutic for interpreting the Bible. Think of the upcoming alternative interpretations as temporary expedients - legitimate non-traditional Bible interpretations to help a person loosen themselves from toxic religious mindsets.
In my view, the notion of original sin is an invention of the church. It asser…
