Hacked! An allegory for the Fall.

“Web hosting account deactivated…” the email title shouted at me. I’d been hacked, and my webhost found malware on one of the four sites that I run. My heart sank. What a disaster!

That email launched at least two months of hard labor, ending with changing to an entirely new webhost that wasn’t going to charge me $1,200 to run an antivirus program on my accounts. Wasn’t their firewall supposed to protect me in the first place? What kind of racket was this?

My new host, Metro Fiber Systems, took care of all that, but I still had to go through the painstaking process of moving and protecting four websites. I had to transfer every page of Fundraiserwiki.com one click at a time. It felt like it would never end.

The hacker in the garden.

The time copying and pasting pages back and forth gave me plenty of opportunity to ponder. It occurred to me that this hacking incident could be a great analogy for what happened to human beings in the Garden of Eden.

Adam and Eve lived happily in a protected space with every possible luxury. They could wander around naked without anyone getting twisted up. They had all kinds of fruit trees to delight their taste buds. God Himself walked with them and watched over them.

Then came the first social engineering hack. The serpent snuck in and started passing Eve bad information. “Did God really tell you that you couldn’t eat this fruit? It won’t kill you, it will make you like God. He is just jealous and doesn’t want you to have wisdom.” Pure click-bait. And Eve fell for it. She reached out, picked the fruit and took a big juicy bite.

And like all effective hacks, this one spread past the first victim. “Hey, Adam, try some of this fruit.” Crunch, chew, chew. “Oh no! What have we done!” Too late. The hacker’s plan had succeeded. The payload had been delivered.

Killer fruit.

This was a bad day. The Catholic Church teaches that this changed the path of humanity forever. All of our first parent’s descendants would bear the mark of this bad decision, called Original Sin. St. Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 5 when he says that sin and death entered into the world through the sin of one man. He’s talking about Adam’s sin and the effects of Original Sin. But what does the term ‘Original Sin’ really mean?

Think about it this way:

Human beings consist of hardware and software like a computer. A computer is made up of hardware (processors, memory, screen, inputs, outputs, wires connecting it all) and software (operating system, apps, virus protection). If you only have the hardware, a computer is just a lump of metal, glass, semi-conductors, and plastic. Similarly, a body without a soul is just a corpse. The soul activates all the various parts of the body so that it can sustain itself, grow, learn, and interact with the environment. Very much the way the right software brings a computer to life.

Now imagine your soul, the software that runs your body, getting cracked by a hacker. A virus has been uploaded and now things are no longer working the way that they should. The virus makes it difficult for you to recognize the truth. You get false positives and false negatives mixed in with real information. The virus makes it difficult for you to do good and easy to do evil, when it should be the other way around. And the virus stirs up your emotions and desires to be excited in the wrong way the wrong things.

Such is the state of the human soul infected by Original Sin.

My kingdom for an anti-virus.

Like a virus in infiltrating computer network, the effects of eating that one bit of fruit passed through the family line. Not only were Adam and Eve affected by the virus, so were all of their children, grandchildren, etc. So every living person. It affects everyone.

What can be done about it? Baptism.

Baptism reboots the soul and runs a comprehensive anti-virus. It upgrades the software with patches that completely restore it to wholeness. It starts with an exorcism which is much more explicit in the older versions of the sacrament.

The sacrament first casts out the demon, then initiates the person into the life of grace. Sanctifying grace, the gift imparted by the Holy Spirit in baptism, replaces broken software and repairs the soul damaged by Original Sin.

The hacker lurks.

I can almost hear you asking, “Then why do Christians keep doing evil things?” Here’s the bad news. The hacker is still out there. And he’s constantly at work trying to lead everyone into sin. He’s a one trick pony. He can’t hurt God, whom he hates with an untiring bitterness, so he attacks human beings.

Just like a secure network, the soul that has been baptized has been restored to the original freedom that Adam and Eve lost in the garden. And just like Adam and Eve, that soul has an enemy that constantly seeks to destroy it. The world is a lot more complicated than it was back then. The serpent has far more opportunities to hack the baptized soul once more. When he convinces me to commit actual sin, I’ve clicked on the bait. I’ve opened myself up to new malware that will make it easier to sin and harder to resist sin in the future.

And this is why Jesus gave us the sacrament of confession. Baptism is a one time fix… it can’t be repeated. But God knew that we would need continued technical support. He knows His enemy as well as He knows everything else. The sacrament of confessions is like running the anti-virus and malware remover that you run if you click on the wrong website. It cleans and restores our souls once more.

The moral of the story.

The sacraments of baptism and confession will change your life. More specifically, they change your soul and make it easier to do good and resist doing bad. Everybody wins!

Incidentally, I still pray for the person that hacked my sites. If they’re that talented with a computer, they could be making good money doing something good with their talents. They’ve just been hacked themselves and the malware is running wild.