The Fall in Postmodern Western Terms

The Man and the Woman lived in Paradise. They were innocent; they had not yet departed from God’s revealed ways for them.
The Tempter came into Paradise and spoke to the Woman. He asked her about all the resources in the area, and wondered aloud if God had said all of it was provided for their needs. The Woman responded it was indeed, but there in the center of Paradise was something they weren’t supposed to mess with at all. Doing so would be fatal.
The item she mentioned was assuming the authority to decide and evaluate what was good and just. Humans could choose that, but God warned it was deadly.
The Tempter insisted that was not exactly the truth. What would actually happen is she would suddenly be able to understand things from God’s perspective. In other words, the Tempter assured her if she simply took upon herself the authority to think and reason about what’s really important, and not bow to revelation, she would be truly free and happy.
So she took the bait. The Man was foolish enough not to argue with the idea, but he knew better. They both placed their human reason on the throne of decision and began to evaluate all things for themselves.
Immediately they knew they had made a big mistake. This business of human reason was a hideous, ugly beast, making them feel ashamed they had given it any authority at all. They tried to find ways to cover their new weakness, but ended up missing the point entirely. That was the nature of the weakness.
So when God came to visit, as He always did, they were intensely aware they could not stand before Him. They knew their idiocy would make His Presence fatal to their now damaged beings. So they hid out.
God called to them, then asked if they had chosen that one possible failure, out of all the other things they could have had. The Man answered from his now broken perception of reality, whining about his moral failures and blaming his wife. God spoke to the Woman to find out if she knew what she had done. She admitted being totally deceived about the whole thing. The Tempter was given no chance to explain, because he was never out of character.
So God cursed the Tempter, warning him there would come a time when his craven choice to attack the woman on the one issue wherein she was weak, and thereby attacking the Man through his weakest point, that the Tempter would one day be crushed by someone born of a woman, a mere human. It would be someone who didn’t suffer such weakness.
To the Woman, he warned her weakness was now magnified in her broken being. She would fight tooth and nail to again reach that authority to tell her man what to do so he would obey. Yet, the Man would have no trouble figuring out how to dominate her when it mattered to him. It was his destiny to always be the final decision maker, and it didn’t matter what she wanted. The most precious gift of all — their unity — would be very hard to achieve.
The Man was warned he would never quite understand by his reasoning power what really mattered. He would pursue physical comfort and never really get much. Even at his best, he would still die relatively young because he would no longer understand by his own reasoning what God had done in Creation, and how the moral fabric of the universe worked.
Then God gave them a means to cover themselves just enough to survive awhile until they had adjusted to the new situation. They were exposed to a world from which they were now disconnected, no longer God’s managers over it. They would exercise some talents through intelligence, but never enough to really grasp the nature of things. The moral fabric became invisible, no longer an instinct, because it belonged to the eternal plane, and they were now in the fallen plane.
Then God placed His revelation to guard His gifts. On one level, mankind would have to submit to the Laws in order to find any representative portion of Paradise here on this plane. They would have to choose that before they could even hear about the other plane of existence above. From that time forward, all humanity could return only by dying on one level or another.
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The fundamental nature of the Fall was placing the human intellect as ruler over the decisions about fundamental things of our existence. It necessarily means rejecting revelation, or at least taking authority to judge revelation, and guarantees an inability to understand it. To subject all things to the tests of reason is the very root nature of what it means to be fallen.
Faith is the means to passing that Flaming Sword of Truth. Faith dethrones the human intellect, and puts the spirit-Spirit nexus in charge. The mind becomes merely the executive, the element charged with the responsibility of organizing and implementing what comes out the spirit. Faith does is not at all reasonable, but makes demands wholly unreasonable. It demands you walk into that Flaming Sword, that you take up your Cross — that gory implement of tortured execution — and face utter failure as humans measure such things. Success as the Spirit sees things is not at all consistent with the way fallen men see it.