I’m glad you brought up the Christian idea of original sin. Born sinful, Christians believe we must accept Jesus in order to live forever. There’s some ambiguity there, because supposedly Hell would also be forever. But, to just focus on the common phrases used by them, such as, ‘ever lasting life’ being the consequences of accepting Jesus, and ‘eternal death’ being the consequence of not, we can perhaps see that the origins of the concept of original sin and Christian salvation didn’t revolve around the idea of eternal Hell contrasting with eternal Heaven.
So the idea is this, though I admit I’m new to it myself: To live among ones ancestors, in the culture they’ve lived in so long that the myths they tell have no known origins in contemporary forms of chronology, and to be accepted by them, in other words to be in line with them, is to take part in the continuation of this old culture - to one day become one of the many nameless ancestors that could be said to even be worshipped, to ‘live forever’, using Christian terminology.
To be outcast by them is to lose your rights to that place. Even if we discount what ‘taking part in it’s continuation’ would mean on most levels, it certainly would preclude any direct genetic part.
To owe a debt to the Judeo-Christian God, is to owe a debt to one who has no actual relation to yourself. It’s hardly less than the same thing as being outcast.
So when you notice that what I’m saying seems like a secular version of original sin, that doesn’t mean that that it came as a consequence of Christianity; as some form of distortion of it. Christianity and Judaism were distortions of paganism, which came first after all.
I understand what you mean by that question, and its tempting to just say that the cause and effects involved with humans is much more complicated, but really your metaphor can work well to illustrate what I’m saying. Taken outside of the context of being in immediate danger, a volcanic eruption is very beautiful, in fact the entire concept is. Lave heated in the unseen depths of the Earth arise on very rare occasions to from new islands or expand on established land. For the lava to do otherwise would lack beauty. There’s really no example for how that could be done, but to turn to a similar analogy, that of water flowing to the sea. If a river were to be dammed into a lake which is emptied for use before it ever has a chance to ever come to much size, is to destroy the beauty of that river.
There’s no need to resolve the natural/unnatural dichotomy here. That such a dam would situation would destroy the river’s beauty and fail to come close to replacing it with the man-made beauty of the dam structure seems clear. So without a connection to our ancestors, even the recognition of a debt, then all that we are and do is just a poor replacement.
