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.
Wrong, how?
However, you are missing the main point. You are looking at this from much the same perspective as the secularist Liberal. You are looking at man and his "goodness" from man's view, not God's, and in light of man's wisdom, not God's Word.
The fact man continually corrupts God's view and purpose - even when genuinely trying to act on God's behest and in accordance with His Word - only lends increased credence to the principle of the genuine hopelessly depraved state of a natural man.
"A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals."
--Agent Kay, Men In Black
The same observation (with about the same amount of individual exceptions) seems to apply to moral conduct.
I was basically trying to demonstrate based on these conflicts that what we are seeing is what we are really like. We don't teach children to be bad. We teach them to be good. And the tricky part is teaching them WHY they should be good.
He simply didn't get it. He thought it was just innocent conflict. Innocent yes, because the kids don't know any better. But did he ever reflect on why he knows it's good to compromise and to share? Perhaps not, because he must have assumed that we eventually come to that realization simply by aging, I guess, since we are basically good.
Sorry but you are wrong. Christianity states that all men are inherently evil. That's why we need a Saviour. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
God Save America (Please)
That's the main reason why Christians are abjured to condemn only deeds -- sins -- and not the persons who commit them -- sinners. It all holds together nicely, if we remember to retain our humility.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://www.palaceofreason.com
And herein this equation is the real battle -- Believing the lies of a Satan vs. the Way and the Truth of the matter.
Another "truism", though not "entirely human", is that there is but one God, and hence but one morality, most fully developed in the Hebrew Bible.
This concept drives secular humanists like Larry King nuts. He is all I get to watch in Germany since they cancelled Fox. King invariably cross examines well known christian pastors like Franklin Graham or DR. Dobson if they believe a good person can get to heaven without believing in Jesus. It is clear that diversity is more important to secularists like King than salvation. That is the ultimate in Political Correctness.
Fallen, being in the state of disobeying God and having the nature to disobey God, is no different from evil.
Lets start by defining evil. Evil is "morally wrong or bad" according to websters. Sin, disobeying God, is morally wrong and bad. Sinners, those who commit sin, are committing moral wrongness. They are morally wrong as they are fulfilling their nature to disobey God.
The bible says all have sinned. Therefore all are morally wrong. All man is evil. And left to ourselves we are beyond redemption. We cannot save ourselves.
Fortunately Jesus draws all men unto Himself and by his blood washes away our sin nature.
(I don't have the time to add in the scriptural proof of this. Perhaps another day)
GSA(P)
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