Many people have wondered why, if Adam and Eve sinned, every one of their descendants (including you and me) are still paying for it:  why are we born with the damage they have done?
     Some suggest that this simply reflects the idea, an idea very prevalent in the time the Bible was composed, of corporate sin:  what the mother and father do affects the children, their children's children, and so on.  Sin never occurs in isolation.  We see hints of this in some of the Greek tragedies.  Here, a male or female head of a household commits an act of egregious injustice, and although he or she may continue to live, relatively unscathed, as time passes, the effects of his or her deeds eventually bring his or her entire house down.  Their families are never the same.  They're warped for eternity.
     There is much in this that is true.  Obviously, what an individual does may well affect those who around her and, if this person is a political leader, perhaps her nation as well. It's the nature of cause and effect.  In the writings of Ezekiel (chapters eighteen and thirty-three), however, we see a different perspective on this.  While these chapters do not reject the idea of corporate sin altogether, they do let us see God's ways in a different light.  Whereas before, God says to the prophet, you believed that what the father does, the children will also inevitably do, too, I'm telling you today that, nonetheless, I look at each person individually.  Each person's sin and transgression is unique to and contained in her.  I look at a person's individual deeds, God says, not what her father or mother did.
     If we apply this idea to modern Western jurisprudence, we see that it makes sense. We cannot hold a parent totally accountable for her child's wrongdoing, and we certainly cannot hold a child totally accountable for her parent's error and sin.  Although blame, in part, remains, in the end, our actions are our own.
     Adam and Eve made a colossal mistake, yes, and we all are still paying for it, yes, but we are each paying for it in our own way.  We're individuals before God.  It's the beauty of human uniqueness.
     Would we really want it any other way?