Thank you for the thoughtful response! I actually agree that from a higher perspective, "original sin" can be a working theory to explain why fundamental ignorance exists. The problem I have is just that it's been used throughout history as an excuse to split the world up into us and them, the saved and the sinners. It does humanity and interfaith harmony no good to ignore how certain abrahamic doctrines might be interpreted in a way that continues to divide up humanity based on silly non-existent temporal identities.

I also see similar patterns in pretty much all religious traditions - yet I would certainly not have been able to do so if I hadn't been given real tools to transform my own egoic delusions, tools which come from several of the Eastern traditions which throughout history have suffered at the hands of intolerance due to this notion of doctrine over direct experience, which is a specific characteristic of the abrahamic religions. I do not think that humanity can heal from the immense trauma they have wrought on the indigenous knowledge systems of the world unless their more dogmatic aspects are truly critiqued and rejected, for the benefit of all of humanity (so as to heal the popular notion that religion is dogmatic, unthinking, and irrelevant, which has seriously damaged our attitude towards the sacred and instigated a proliferation of the profane).

It is just as you say, though, and this notion of encountering "foreign friends" at the top of the mountain is one of the most beautiful and truthful metaphors that I've seen - if there is supreme consciousness, surely it would be overjoyed at phenomena such as this.