We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.
Sin is very real. Every person is imperfect, suffers temptations that distract them away from thoughts and actions that serve God, and we fall short a times. When we knowingly and willfully indulge our imperfections, this is sin. But sinning and falling short of the glory of God are not the same thing. All of us fall short by nature; we all sin by choice. All things apart from God are imperfect. Until and unless we achieve total communion with Him that imperfection will be a part of us. In this sense there is little that we can do in the present about falling short. This is not the case with sin. Every time we sin it is from a lack of conscious effort to do what is correct and holy or worse a conscious effort do act in incorrect and unholy ways. By the exercise of discipline, we can defeat sin moment by moment and day by day. It is this exercise that brings us into greater communion with God and over the long term allows God to totally change our nature. All sin has natural and spiritual consequences. A person cannot for instance abuse their own body or mind without eventually suffering for it. And when out of selfishness and ignorance a person abuses others they become equally weakened both temporally and spiritually. Eventually we are punished for all of our sins.
Adam was the first prophet (a person who speaks directly with God), but I suspect that he was not the first Homo sapiens. I was not in the Garden of Eden, nor have I had any prophetic visions of Adam and Eve, but I am moved by arguments that the earth and mankind are more than a mere six thousand years old. I try to be sympathetic to Creationists, but I could hardly imagine being one myself, and am unconvinced that the issue pertains directly to my salvation. As with all the prophets I seek to learn from Adam’s encounters with God and the mistakes that he made. Adam’s transgression, the desire for “knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:17) and what I suspect was his desire to control and define them, was only possible because of his close communion with God. The false hope of Adam and Eve to become gods rather than live in service to God was the first and greatest sin. In that sense sin entered the world. We must learn from their transgression, or we are doomed to repeat it.
Latter Day Sinner 