Posted on 12/30/2002 11:02:27 PM PST by JohnHuang2
No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.
In 20 years as a radio talk-show host, I have dialogued with thousands of people, of both sexes and from virtually every religious, ethnic and national background. Very early on, I realized that perhaps the major reason for political and other disagreements I had with callers was that they believed people are basically good, and I did not. I believe that we are born with tendencies toward both good and evil. Yes, babies are born innocent, but not good.
Why is this issue so important?
First, if you believe people are born good, you will attribute evil to forces outside the individual. That is why, for example, our secular humanistic culture so often attributes evil to poverty. Washington Sen. Patty Murray, former President Jimmy Carter and millions of other Westerners believe that the cause of Islamic terror is poverty. They really believe that people who strap bombs to their bodies to blow up families in pizzerias in Israel, plant bombs at a nightclub in Bali, slit stewardesses' throats and ram airplanes filled with innocent Americans into office buildings do so because they lack sufficient incomes.
Something in these people cannot accept the fact that many people have evil values and choose evil for reasons having nothing to do with their economic situation. The Carters and Murrays of the West – representatives of that huge group of naive Westerners identified by the once proud title "liberal" – do not understand that no amount of money will dissuade those who believe that God wants them to rule the world and murder all those they deem infidels.
Second, if you believe people are born good, you will not stress character development when you raise children. You will have schools teach young people how to use condoms, how to avoid first and secondhand tobacco smoke, how to recycle and how to prevent rainforests from disappearing. You will teach them how to struggle against the evils of society – its sexism, its racism, its classism and its homophobia. But you will not teach them that the primary struggle they have to wage to make a better world is against their own nature.
I attended Jewish religious schools (yeshivas) until the age of 18, and aside from being taught that moral rules come from God rather than from personal or world opinion, this was the greatest difference between my education and those who attended public and private secular schools. They learned that their greatest struggles were with society, and I learned that the greatest struggle was with me, and my natural inclinations to laziness, insatiable appetites and self-centeredness.
Third, if you believe that people are basically good, God and religion are morally unnecessary, even harmful. Why would basically good people need a God or religion to provide moral standards? Therefore, the crowd that believes in innate human goodness tends to either be secular or to reduce God and religion to social workers, providers of compassion rather than of moral standards and moral judgments.
Fourth, if you believe people are basically good, you, of course, believe that you are good – and therefore those who disagree with you must be bad, not merely wrong. You also believe that the more power that you and those you agree with have, the better the society will be. That is why such people are so committed to powerful government and to powerful judges. On the other hand, those of us who believe that people are not basically good do not want power concentrated in any one group, and are therefore profoundly suspicious of big government, big labor, big corporations and even big religious institutions. As Lord Acton said long ago, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton did not believe people are basically good.
No great body of wisdom, East or West, ever posited that people were basically good. This naive and dangerous notion originated in modern secular Western thought, probably with Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Frenchman who gave us the notion of pre-modern man as a noble savage.
He was half right. Savage, yes, noble, no.
If the West does not soon reject Rousseau and humanism and begin to recognize evil, judge it and confront it, it will find itself incapable of fighting savages who are not noble.
Do you have pews at all? The Serbian church I visited up here had pews but all stood.
An excellent insight that somehow got lost in the noise of the thread. Perhaps that's because a nation cannot analyze itself. But the optimism you mention and the naivete that I encounter daily are what leads us to say that "people are people" (Huh? What's that supposed to mean?) and parrot that all American cliche you'll never hear outside our borders that "people are the same everywhere". Well, they ain't, or we'd be all dancing in the street celebrating the 9/11 attacks!
That optimism and naivete are what leads us (as a nation) to elect the Krintongs and to almost elect Goron, and to reject straight talkers like Keyes, Buchanan and Perot (with all their faults, which, from a bird's eye view, aren't any worse than the faults of the Bushes!)
This is the voice of "Arminianism": Free Will...co-mixture of good and bad "tendencies" inside of us yada, yada...yada...
Prager denies that we are born totally depraved, as Romanists do.
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Many are both. The various proportionalities are a matter of unimportance to calculate. What matters is that any political system will be corrupted and this results in a first priorit of needing to keep one's self free from political systems and one's life separate from that of other people.
School's going okay. I'm happy to be out for another few days on Christmas break. As to my silence, I eventually got tired of arguing in circles. ;)
Got a copy of Vol. I of Theological Institutes for Christmas--my parents got it through alibris.com. ;)
TG
Speaking as a 'voice of Arminianism' myself, I can deny that quite handily. As an Arminian (an admittedly Wesleyan, Biblical, total depravity-believing one), I affirm with any Calvinist that man is 'very far gone from righteousness.' Free grace has always been the emphasis of "high" or Wesleyan-Arminianism. (I am including Arminius himself as a 'high' Arminian, though too early for a Wesleyan-Arminian.) The problem lies in the subtle deviation from that 'high' Arminianism among many churches into liberalism and semi- or full Pelagianism.
Our beliefs are different, as we really don't like Augustine all that much.
"St. Paul tells us (sin) is an egocentric illness contracted from the parasites called corruptibility and death. Adam died because he sinned, and death spread to all men. Now, we sin because we die, for the sting of death is sin. Sin reigns in death, in our corruptibility and mortality. Death is the root; Sin is the thorn that springs from it. In the end, the last enemy that shall be destroyed is the endles cycle of corruptibility and death, the Seat of Sin. Ontologically, Jesus Christ has already accomplished this by His own death and Resurrection. At the Second Coming, then, He shall terminate these enemies once and for all, freeing men from all taint of Sin forever and raising us body and soul to incorruptibility and immortal life. Thus, without His Resurrection in the first place, there is NO SALVATION! His Resurrection destroys Satan and Sin by destroying the source of their power: Death and corruptibility.
This is why we proclaim at Pascha, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death..."
Do you have pews at all?
In the Russian tradition, we do not.
Thanks for the ping, RnMomof7.
Regarding babies, skull stomper, watch any newborn to 2 year old. They display anger when they don't get what they want. We must train them to control themselves when they are of the age to "understand" temper tantrums are wrong. Their angry displays do not make them evil children, merely evidence that there is a badness in them already which must be brought under control and done away with, if at all possible.
Left to "become" who they are without correction, we see these children later, in pre-teen and teen years (and even younger), as tyrants and/or manipulators...only concerned about and motivated by their own selfish wants and desires without regard to others' needs. These little tyrants are children who have not been taught to deny themselves or to control their wills.
Humanist psychologists would not have parents constrain babies/toddler/teens because their "self-esteem" may be injured if they are told they've done something "wrong," they don't "measure up" to a moral STANDARD of behavior. To humanists, "wrong" is relative.
I think that's another reason why you see so many kids doing so many things morally wrong today (as opposed to mischievous behavior). They have not been taught to deny their selfishness, have not been taught to control their will, have not been equipped to understand moral right and moral wrong. They are "standard" free, left to forge out their own tyrannical versions of right and wrong in our "if it feels good, do it" society.
And I believe you're mistaken. End of conversation.
I do not believe in "original sin". I also do not believe that you have a clue. Truth is self-evident.
Kevin, is it fair to ask why, if Man is inherently evil, there would be any struggle at all?
Oh, well. We all take our chances, one guesses.
"...why, if Man is inherently evil, there would be any struggle at all?"
Since God is good, I believe God needs us to be good, His goodness so enhanced.
If there were no such struggle, we would all seem automatons.
I'm not so sure he feels entirely that way...at least about men: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality.
Thank you for confirming that you are indeed a pagan.
Who are you to be so judgemental? Do you walk on water? I am underwhelmed.
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