When I was a young conservative man, I listened to what my conservative Christian teachers told me:
Humanity is totally depraved.
Humanity is evil.
There is no one good, no, not one.
I listened and I believed. I believed it so intently that I could not conceive of this theory being anything but entirely, 100% perfectly correct and indisputable. After all, look at Hitler. Look at those men who would rape women... who would beat children. Monsters. Awful human beings. And there's a reason for that, I was told and I believed: Humanity is evil, corrupt, depraved in every possible way... the human mind in ALL humans was darkened and incapable of understanding good.
So, I was told and so, I believed.
The longer I live, the more I listened to conservative "defense" of this idea, the more that conservatives have pushed me away from believing this is a rational (or biblical, for that matter) opinion/human theory. It is, at the very best, entirely unproven and unsupported and at worst, an awful, oppressive and damaging theory promoted for less-than-noble reasons.
And why have I changed my opinion? Simple reality. I can see with my own eyes that there are indeed, good people in the world. Many of them.
And understand: I'm not saying that all of humanity is good all of the time. Of course, not. There are genuinely bad people deliberately doing genuinely bad/harmful things. There are the Hitlers, the rapists, the abusers. The men who would sexually assault women then boast how they can get away with it because of their power, wealth and position.
But the every day people - especially the helpers - those who teach, who nurse, who nurture, who assist, the social workers, the environmentalists, the people whose jobs are to empower the poor, marginalized, the sick and disabled... I know these people. They are just who and what they appear to be: Good people engaged in helpful activities for positive reasons.
And, at the same time that they're being helpful and working for justice and peace, they're also not engaged in deliberately harmful, "bad" behavior.
The social worker who has worked for 38 years now - all of her adult life - who entered the field because she wanted to be true to God and God's repeated calls to ally with and for the poor and marginalized... and so, for almost four decades has helped homeless people get off the streets, to find housing, to get needed health care, to get out of abusive relationships, to get out of addictions. She has welcomed the poor and homeless into her own home and kitchen. She's helped the children in these homeless families get needed resources. She's seen some of those formerly un-housed children get college degrees and go into helping professions themselves.
And sure, she's sometimes impatient, she has her own anxieties and depressions, but she hasn't stolen, she hasn't assaulted people, she's been faithful in her relationships, she sure hasn't killed.
She is a genuinely good person, a hard worker whose life work has NOT been just to enrich herself, but to find solutions to problems that poor and oppressed people face. She is a genuinely good person, by any rational measure.
And I personally know dozens of people like this intimately. And for those I don't know as well, I know hundreds of people less well whose life stories fit this model. They are clearly good people by reasonable measures. There is no serious evidence of corruption or total depravity or evil in their lives.
They are, to a person, imperfect people. But being imperfect is not the same as being bad. It's just not.
I bring this up because I've been asking this question for years now and trying to find examples for months now: WHERE is the hard evidence to support this claim that all humans are bad people, totally corrupt and depraved... evil, even? WHERE is the evidence that they have "rebellious hearts?" I've asked... as well as asking for a definition of "rebellious heart..."?
And every time, this question goes unanswered and ignored. The few times that anyone even tries to address it, there answer is almost always something along the lines of "We don't have to answer! It's self-evident! It's already proven!"
But it's not. It's just not. Go ahead - do a search for anyone even trying to make a rational case that proves that all humans are evil, bad and have "rebellious hearts..." There's no one even trying to prove it.
They are assuming that the answer is a given - "Of course, people are evil, ALL people! That's why the only just punishment is an eternity of torture!" Just like I believed, when I was a young conservative. But that assumption remains unproven and the unproven nature of the claim is problematic. One can't just bully their way into forcing agreement... especially when you're making a counter intuitive claim - a claim that real world data disproves.
We can SEE good people all around us. Every day. Or at least I can.
The only way I ever see any try to deal with that is, "Well, you're not judging who is good rightly... They may be good by human standards, but not by "god's standards." But when I ask for proof or support for that, the question remains unanswered.
I find it incredibly puzzling, this complete avoidance of the topic.
But the flip side of all of this is that these "people are evil" theorists have helped me see the beautiful goodness of the Beloved Community. There ARE so many people out there being truly good, truly great and what a blessing that is to see in action. So, thank you conservatives, for finally pushing me completely away from the "people are evil" failed theory.
10 comments:
1. The people that “proved it” were 17th century oppositional lawyers of Western Europe.
So, today, the people who assume the worldview that the world and all that is in it is, in its basic nature, evil, are descendants of social learning from radical Protestantism. Usually we keep what we are taught to believe as uniquely important.
But evil in history is always met with good. Over a million killed or casualties dedicated their lives to what they knew would be the end of slavery. 80 million! lost their lives in a victory over fascism. A thousand women were killed or beaten in the Suffragette Movement. (It would behoove Marshal and Craig - who blame those protesting black people being murdered by our police force for violence - to remember that some White women committed bombings and arson which killed a handful and injure more; because their rights as equal human beings were being denied.) Thousands of nonviolent black people and scores of white people - Christians, Muslims, Jews, agnostics, atheists - were killed or beaten in the Civil Rights Movement.
Cyrus released Israel from bondage. Islamic government in Spain ruled a society that included Christians and Jews with diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Christian Reconquista regime required baptism or killed or exiled all the others. Frederick III, the Habsburg emperor invited Jews being cast out to settle and work in what is now western Ukraine, southern Poland, and eastern Slovakia. 450 years later, Hitler slaughtered the greater part of them, and afterward, the coasts and big cities of the US and historically black colleges offered them a home, but not the heartland of the good ole USA.
Evil and Good are there to be seen.
Radical Protestantism, contradictorily, only sees EVIL out there, but demands good at home. Original sin ceases to be case for commonality and compassion and communal identity, as it was for the most of the church’s life and is instead a motive for jihad.
This is not the case with liturgical and sacramental Christian practice. Good and Evil are options in the Roman, Eastern, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Mar Thoma, Anglican, Lutheran, Quaker, and UCC churches.
Sin is part of us. Part of the us that is also made in the image and likeness of God. The Fall, in Orthodoxy and Anglicanism and the Roman church, is not an existential or essential shaping of our nature. We were made by god, for Christ’s sake! But we are faulty… as well as bearing the capacity to be glorifying for all. We learn and grow *through* our faults. Many, though, like our mutual thugs, exercise their Will to refuse to learn some things that they cannot stand. In this, they are sinning and their self interest in these areas necessitates their being brutal to their neighbors rather than being a Good Samaritan.
2. Your family and friends and colleagues and acquaintances and the members of your surrounding community, and you yourself, bear this nature of being made in the image and likeness of god into your relationships with each other and into the world. You are good by nature but humanly good. Which is to say you are all also prey to and give into various acts motivated by anxieties of self worth.
And this is why, to me, spiritual faith and practice of most kinds - if owned and practiced without the sins of pride, judgment, and concupiscence [like the Thugs do] - keep us humble, and therefore attentive to others, and therefore, for us, Christlike.
3. None of this answers the glaring scandal that of the inference of an absolute good god allowing evil.
Fundamentally, this unanswered question provokes the unconscious anxiety that so attacks the christian faith of the thugs. They do not realize this anxious suffering drives their terrifying gripe on the Bible as a rule book. They destroy the sacredness of scripture by treating it as a tablet of stone. In a reversal of Paul, their enslavement to their anxiety makes them replace their heart of flesh with this idol of rock hard words.
The Hebrew Scriptures and Paul are direct on calling this weak and corrupt faith.
For those of us with mature faith, the question of an absolute good god allowing evil in the world is exactly the same as astoundingly scandalous reality that god became incarnate in human flesh - what an act of raising humanity to eternal worth - and the facing suffering and a cruel death in order to - timelessly, cosmically - bring about absolute justice and beauty.
The good, the true, the beautiful. These things are the created nature of the universe. For those of us who cry out to God to rain down justice and truth and love like a torrent, we must wait in faith while we, too, bear the sufferings of our wronged, cheated, abused, murdered. If we do not bear them - while preserving our own bequeathed goods - then we are not following Christ.
We all, believers and not, act and wait for better future for all.
For myself, I do better when I have something to hope for. And faith is the hope in things unseen
Once again, that’s probably too much scriptural reference for Bubba and the Thugs. Idolators don’t like to peer too long at their Idol. Because it contains both too much and too little for the 17th century. For the 21st as well, Dan, but that’s our problem.
You were never "conservative" simply because of rote repetition or acceptance of that which you believe is emblematic of conservatism.
You again ignore what Scripture says and pretend it means something else, without doing a thing to present a logical, coherent or intelligent argument for an alternative (or "true") meaning. So the evidence is from there if the argument is strictly about what is good from a Christian perspective. You stray from that as it suits you and then pretend you haven't been informed of the legitimate source of this rightly held position. YOU seem to want think that it means everyone you know is an abject asshole. That's not the argument. Striving to do good doesn't make one good. It makes one a person who strives to do good. It means a person has a desire to serve. It doesn't mean the person is "good" from a Christian perspective. It means the person is good by a personal, subjective perspective of what constitutes "good". We can live with that in this world, in order to express ourselves and know someone isn't likely a threat to do grievous harm. But that still doesn't make them "good".
You speak of what your "good" associates don't do, as if that list is sufficient to prove them "good". It doesn't, because not all evil is as blatantly destructive and damaging as you need for your personal subjective definition. And has been exhaustively mentioned, what constitutes "good" is culturally dependent, and even if there's overlap, it doesn't account for what doesn't overlap.
My opinion of those I regard as "good" people isn't in conflict with Christ's insistence there's no one good but God, or any Scriptural teaching along those lines. That's because when I apply the word to anyone, it's done in comparison to others, not in comparison to God. No one YOU know is anything like God. The length of the universe isn't long enough to describe the disparity between man and God.
The fact that no one is good but God is why we need Christ. It's why no sacrifice in the OT period was sufficient to truly atone and become "good" enough and why no "good" act is sufficient now.
So all you're doing is arguing against truth by presenting examples, not of "good" people, but people who do enough nice things that among we lowly human beings, WE choose to label them as "good". Even so, we say they're good people, not "good" as the word is used in Scripture to teach that only God is. So yeah, it is about perfection. And whether you choose to say "good" or "perfect", the same truth applies. We're neither and because of that we need Christ, without Whom there's no getting in.
The truth of the concept is not a slight on those who do good routinely. This is where you go wrong. Those who understand it and accept it aren't going to start calling people evil on account of it. You need to get over that fear and stop pretending Scripture lies to you.
Marshal is vapid he talks about scripture but doesn’t know it. He’s so like Trump. Just a blowhard.
What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
or mortals, that you care for them?
You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned them with glory and honor
subjecting all things under their feet.
Marshal began right off by making an unsupported and rather silly claim:
You were never "conservative" simply because of rote repetition or acceptance of that which you believe is emblematic of conservatism.
I was conservative because I believed conservative tenets and ideology. That is what makes one conservative. Don't bother repeating this false claim, it's just an inane nothing.
Marshal continued by making another unsupported and fallacious claim:
You again ignore what Scripture says and pretend it means something else, without doing a thing to present a logical, coherent or intelligent argument for an alternative (or "true") meaning.
You continue to commit the logical fallacy (probably several) of begging the question. The question IS, "Did Jesus mean that there were/are literally NO good people...?" THAT is the question. You're presuming the answer is Yes and then saying I haven't disproven it.
And I have offered a real world, observable rational explanation of why it CAN'T be literal: We see good people. Good, as good is traditionally counted.
I don't know if you are just so blinded by your allegiance to your human traditions that you can't see this or what, but that IS a reasonable answer, even if you don't understand it.
Marshal:
You speak of what your "good" associates don't do, as if that list is sufficient to prove them "good".
I speak of Good as Good is typically defined and understood. There ARE people with good hearts who are kind, compassionate, helpful, loving, forgiving and giving. They try deliberately to live their lives to make the world a better place. We can SEE this in the real world. That IS what they DO (in addition to what they don't do - things like kill, rape or sexually assault women and then laugh and boast about it as some actual deviants are wont to do).
Don't bother responding and I may or may not leave your nothing comment. The ONLY thing you can respond with are things like:
1. YOUR personal definition of Good, to try to make sense of your nonsense.
2. Why your personal alternative definition of Good is authoritative or means anything.
3. Some objective proof that I'm mistaken in noting the reality of Good People.
Empty claims (the entirety of your comment that remains so far) are nothing. They're less than nothing. When presented as a given fact, they are objectively lies and harmful to truth and reality.
People are tired of the modern GOP living as if your false reality should be taken seriously.
Trump Supporter Whose Police Report Fueled Cat-Eating Rumor Found Pet In Basement Days Later: WSJ
The rumor gained national attention after Donald Trump accused Haitian migrants in Ohio of stealing and eating neighborhood pets during last week's presidential debate.
Setting aside the great costs that the Magop is costing in terms of decency and human rights and Democracy, how many actual dollars is Team Trump costing the US with their repeated stirring up of bomb threats and days lost in school and days off work and just basic mental suffering and oppression?
That's me, Dan. Dang computers and hi-fi modern techobabblery.
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