What a dreadful utterly pretentious and obscurantist title. The essay is also full of the usual unexamined christian presumptions and cliches.

What is the Truth of our situation?
And conversely what are the origins of the dreadful situation (or psychotic split) that we are all suffering from?
What if the dreadful situation (or psychotic split) was essentially created by all of the old-time christian "authorities" such as Augustine? And held in place and perpetuated by all of the benighted christian "priests" (meditating on fear and death)
This humorous talk provides a humorous Understanding of our situation:
1. http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/dreadedgomboo/chapter1.html

This talk provide a unique Understanding of the origins and devastating cultural consequences of the "spirit" versus "flesh" psychotic split in the consciousness of Western man. It was given in response to the Stone Buddhas incident in Afghanistan. Muslim fundamentalists suffer from the same psychotic split - and even more so.
http://www.adidamla.org/newsletters/newsletter-aprilmay2006.pdf

A paragraph on the nature of the sex-paranoid body-negative nature of the "spirit" versus "flesh" education that is taught and promulgated by conservative christians all over the world.

"The entire social and cultural game of antisexual, "spirit against flesh" education is so monstrous, so opposed to incarnate happiness and human responsibility, that it must be considered the primary social and philosophical issue of our time."

Of course the most obvious in-your-face manifestation of this game is the totally irrational opposition by "traditional" "catholics" to the possibility of women being priests in the "catholic" church.

Peter, you sometimes manage to create highly indigestible pieces that require significant exercise of the mental rumen!

I have a view that there is a specific difference between morality and ethics, which is that morality is to some extent innate within social species, while ethics is an attempt to rationally codify behaviours so as to more closely conform to that innate morality. It's an imperfect distinction, but I think an important one.

Having been inclined to this view for a couple of years now, I was very interested to come across this paper

http://web.ncf.ca/collier/papers/BiolTheor-Evolutionary%20Moral%20Realism-Collier-Stingl.pdf

which expresses a similar view, but much more eruditely than I could.

It seems to me that this is very close to the idea of morality as a God-given set of preceptual rules that we can only ever hope to live up to imperfectly, which in turn gives rise to the concept of original sin that you are expressing in your piece.

I agree strongly with your view that there is a role for personal public abnegation as a means of "grounding" ourselves within the social milieu. After all, every other social species has some form of dominance/subjection ritual that emphasises the preeminence of the individual's role as a member of a group over individual self-interest.

For humans, who seem to have a considerably greater power than other species to cognitively override instincts, a ritual which emphasises the importance of the instinctual morality is undoubtedly a functionally useful social component.

I don't agree that the eucharist has an exclusive mortgage on that function, although for some it is undoubtedly important.

Perhaps we need to think about how we might usefully implement a secular equivalent to the eucharist that doesn't, as so many of our secular rituals seem to manage, focus on sacrifice in conflict as the highest exemplar of human morality?