Ancestral Sin (vs. Original Sin)

What humanity inherits from Adam, in the Orthodox understanding, is a condition, not a guilt: mortality, corruption, the passions and a will bent toward sin, into which every person is born and in which each then sins for himself. The Greek of Romans 5:12 says death spread to all men because all sinned; the Latin read the same words as in whom all sinned, meaning in Adam, and St Augustine built on that reading a doctrine of guilt transmitted to every child. The East did not follow him. The image of God is obscured, not destroyed, and freedom remains. This is why the Orthodox Church does not need, and does not receive, the Latin dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which exists to exempt the Virgin from a guilt the East never taught. Baptism is for the remission of sins and for new birth into Christ’s life.