Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 13, 1994                   TAG: 9411110028
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: COFY LOWE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CONCEPT OF ORIGINAL SIN MEANS WE'RE ALL CAPABLE OF ATROCITY

Eager as we were for diversion, though, most of us just as soon would never have heard of Michael and Alexander Smith of Union, S.C., because that would mean that they were still alive.

We are haunted by the image of two children strapped into their seats as their car slipped beneath the still, shadowy waters of Long Lake.

The children's mother, 23-year-old Susan Smith, reportedly has confessed to deliberately sending her children to their deaths. The crime allegedly was motivated by a vain, twisted attempt to salvage a sour love affair.

It is an offense that would horrify almost any society.

Killing children probably is the most heinous crime in the public mind. Killing one's own children - short of the terrifying justification of mercifully attempting to spare them a more horrible death - is so abominable that is borders on the unimaginable.

Nevertheless, it happens often in our country.

The details of the Smith case - those that we know, anyway - make it hard to stand by our foundational legal principle of the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven in a court of law.

People already talk about Smith as "the murderer." Many would impose the death penalty tomorrow.

As outrageous and inexcusable as the children's deaths may have been, it seems to me that religious people have to overcome our instinctive reactions and take a hard look at a wider range of moral considerations than the law does before making judgments about the people involved.

What is justice? What is insanity and how does our understanding of that affect culpability? What does the idea of mercy demand of us? How should the concepts of vengeance and repentance temper our response?

For Christians, we have the inherent conflict between the legal concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and "original sin."

I have to admit that sometimes the doctrine of "original sin" makes me a little uncomfortable. It was hard for me to look at my newborn daughters and think of them as tainted by Adam and Eve's disobedience of God.

But the concept of original sin is helpful, I think, in attempting to understand the deaths of Michael and Alexander Smith. It's not that the boys somehow had committed sin that justified their deaths. But the idea that all of us and any of us are capable of committing sin may help us cope with such unimaginable, almost unbelievable events.

We don't want to admit it. We may deny it. But events such as this remind us that most of us, probably all of us, are capable of atrocity in the right circumstances.

Our response to this crime even has the seeds of evil in it.

In the past week, several commentators have raised questions that ought to make us think about our own reaction and the assumptions we live with every day.

If a poor black woman from inner-city Chicago had reported that a white carjacker had stolen her children and disappeared with them would the story have gotten the media attention the Smith case did?

I doubt it.

If we had heard about it, would we have believed her as long as we believed Susan Smith's story?

I doubt it.

A single act of racism may not equal a single murder, but it should trouble us to contemplate the continued pervasive effects of racial prejudice.

The questions we then have to ask are, who is innocent and who is guilty?