And they think that because THEY believe human nature is malleable, and THEY can be the ones who pound it into shape.
Much evil comes from that mindset. Further down, that is the abandonment of God, which Whittaker Chambers so eloquently elucidated in his seminal work "Witness":
“It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.
It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.”
I think Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness” should be rquired reading for a college degree and for all military officers. When I ask people if they have read it and they have never even heard of it, I am dumbfounded. It was one of the most terrifying books I have ever read.
So powerful!