Evil: our inability to respond to reality and thus, degeneration

Original Sin doesn't mean that we are evil. On the contrary, by nature we're good, we're created good by God, and we're created with good wills. But the point it that something has gone wrong. I think it's a realistic doctrine, in the sense that it's saying that we're all in this together, it's collective. Something has gone deeply wrong in human culture, human history, something is even wrong somehow in a mysterious way at the biological level as well. But the point about the doctrine of the Incarnation, the idea that God has assumed human flesh, for Augustine, is that this is a return to Paradise, the beginning of a transformation - that the original way we're supposed to be, and the original equation, can now be gradually restored. - "On God, Good and Evil," by Scott Stephens