Jonny Heart: Good or Evil?

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Good or Evil?

Have you ever looked at the world in horror? I mean when you take the time to sit down and turn on your local news station how can you not? Every day the hatred and evils of men are displayed for all the world to see and like a frightened helpless sheep you cower on your sofa and wonder what the world is coming too. For man has done all evil deeds and has thought up new ways to accomplish evil. If a scientist from another world or an ignorant being in order to learn more about the human race were to study the natures of man what would it find? Would this “being” be able to witness the good amongst all the corrupt, or classify us all as a species bent on the path of self-destruction?

The simplest of questions in life are always the hardest to answer; what is the soul, does God exist, why, and where do babies come from? The question I ask sometimes and wonder about comes from desperation to not lose faith in the next Generation of “bastards.” I promise I normally do not use swear words however this phrase serves a purpose. According to my dictionary another use for the word can refer to (of a thing) no longer in its pure or original form. The question I ask myself is, are people naturally evil and born with evil inside of them?

About a year ago I attended Sunday school at my home church and the lesson came from Matthew 18 and some how or another the instructor wondered into the discussion about people being separated from God at birth. I was not so quick to let this comment go by. I asked if he believed in original sin and he basically ended up saying yes in the end. I found it hard falling into sync with his idea about the human condition. To say that people enter this world already in sin, equals the plea that people are predestined damned. You can say that because if you believe that people are born with sin then with out their choice they are already damned and are without a chance to resist sin. More importantly the person can plea an excuse to the mighty creator on judgment day and Romans one tells us otherwise. For those who believe in original sin I would like them to explain to the parents of a dead infant exactly where that infant will go. If they are born with sin and then die with out chance to plea for forgiveness for the state they had no choice of being in then according to the justness of God are sentenced to death for eternity. I do admit that the infants are born into a fallen world. Since the world is physical that physical infant is therefore tied to the same fate of that world. Yes, if they survive to a state to realize their fallen ness then they have the chance to respond to God’s call and receive grace in the end but there is no chance for them to be obedient from the beginning. Now with this said it leads me into my point.

I have to think, to believe, and have faith that the people of this world are naturally good and not evil. I even say this about the devil himself. By naturally I mean from the beginning. This is why; the creator exemplifies all goodness and is impervious to evil. God cannot create evil. To do so would be a direct opposite of his own will and God only serves his will and rightfully so. God is pure love and good, what evil can come from pure good, its preposterous to think so. Now, when an innocent infant enters the world I believe with all my heart that this new baby comes without sin and is pure good.

So then how does evil enter into what is good? Romans talks about this as well as my senior patron C.S. Lewis in his awesome book “Mere Christianity.” People chose evil over good. Maybe not realizing it at first or maybe like Adam and Eve are tricked into it, yet it never fails, people turn from God to pursue their own wishes. In doing so they ignore the natural knowledge of right from wrong inside themselves and over the course of life train themselves to ignore that conscience with in them. They pervert the truth into a lie and follow their now blemished hearts desires to what is evil. This is all possible with free will; again something designed to exalt God by choosing his love now used against him by man and man now is consumed by evil. So this brings me back to the beginning. The world we live in today, the horrors that filter through our TV’s and shake us into fear is a product of our own choice to seek out evil. Every person now has two paths to follow. Two paths to chose from, good and evil. Unfortunately we chose evil over good and because of that people say we are naturally evil. That is just not the truth; we pervert the truth because we don’t know how to chose good anymore. Some follow into evil further then others to the point every nature about them is evil. A perfect example is the devil. He has followed so far that every thing about him, which was once good and perfect, is now the opposite of his creator.

This generation will give birth to the next and so on till the return of Christ. Each generation will give themselves over to evil, not that they were evil from birth but at some point become influenced by the prior generation and tricked into doing wrong becoming bastards, an object no longer in its pure original state. For this reason I am ashamed, scared, sad, and angry and you who have a glimmer of truth left should too, but fear not, there is hope.

To be continued…

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."