Is "The Fall" something that has outlived its usefulness, like Hell and the Devil?

I think a lot of our sex phobia, including homophobia, comes from the concept of The Fall. Augustine directly linked Original Sin with sex, but barring his theology, if you accept the idea that we live in a fallen world, then you’re likely to question that mechanism by which people come into this supposedly fallen world, even if it’s merely on a subconscious level. The concept is all around us. It’s drilled until us. We’re told the world isn’t what it should be. If you listen to someone like Rick Santorum, you get the feeling that he sees life as some kind of duty, that getting married, having sex and producing children is a chore. And the fall isn’t just a Christian concept. It’s in Plato’s writings, too, for instance.

But I’ve grown to question it. I’m sure that it still works on me in hidden ways because the idea permeates our culture, but the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t make any sense. Why would a god purposely create a punishing world and put us through the mill? I realize that according to Christian dogma, humanity is being punished for supposed wrongdoing, but I think that explanation has more to do with our need to find a reason for suffering. There is plenty of suffering in the world, at least from our vantage point. It’s easy for us to imagine a world that, to us, would be better than this one--one without war, disease, death… But if there is more to the world than meets the eye, then maybe all of the horrible things that can happen to us are part of life for reasons that have nothing to do with punishment. Maybe the world isn’t fallen at all. Maybe we’re not born sinners who are in need of saving.

I think the belief that we live in a fallen world serves to make people feel guilty and worthless, and I think it serves to make them vulnerable to flimflam artists who promise to show them a way out. I think it might also make people feel ashamed of enjoying the pleasures of the world too much. There seems to be a masochistic element that runs through all of Christian history starting with the martyrs. I’m always struck by how joyless the artwork from the Middle Ages is. The Puritans weren’t exactly a barrel of laughs. And here come gay people who want to form relationships and have sex not out of a sense of duty but for the pleasure of it. They want to take delight in their existence for its own sake and not to fulfill some purpose that is meant to be a drudgery for having the temerity of showing up in this supposedly awful place.