The Sin Gene

I have lately been wondering about the traditional wisdom which insists that man is born with a "sin nature" - an hereditary bent towards evil. Jesus, as the idea goes, avoided this by way of the virgin birth. Since everyone else is and has been born of man and woman, we cannot escape our inevitable fate.

Yesterday we watched on an unltrasound as our new little guy - developing in Erika's womb - did a somersault and squirmed around. Were these movements somehow sinful? Can sin really be a potential energy as well as an actual one? How can he/she really be a sinner - an avoider of God - before ever having the chance even to interact with another person?
Later on, when he she begins to scream because of pain or hunger should we see this as sinful? Or is it, rather, in some way the very essence of what sin is not? Perhaps maintaining such an attitude of complete "self-helplessness" is exactly what Christ meant when he spoke of having faith like a child. I think we are forgetting that sin is not really a disease or defect so much as it is a silence, an absence - stubborn dis-communication.

[At any rate, it is difficult to maintain that Christ was sinless because he did not inherit sin. It is tantamount to saying he was a sort of spiritual eunach who simply had not the capacity to be interested by sin. It is tantamount to saying that the temptation he endured was all for show.]

I can't think that my little one will be "full" of sin at least until he sees how every-man-for-himself the world has really become. Then perhaps he will begin to feel the loneliness of mortality that stabs us all.