There has been no single influence that has done more to prevent human being from finding God and rebuilding his/her character, has done more to lower the moral tone of society that the denial of personal guilt. This repudiation of personal responsibility for one's action is falsely justified in two ways: by assuming that human being is only an animal and by giving to a sense of guilt the tag "morbid."

The excuses are new - the effort to escape responsibility for our ills is ancient. Through the ages, human being has always tried to find something to blame besides himself/herself, for instance, poverty, environment, systems of economics, politics, finances or society in general. But all these failed wholly to convince - they were obviously too unrelated to the person, for all of them are extrinsic. Recently, the materialists hit upon a new scapegoat - not in nature, nor in society, but inside of human himself/herself, namely, his unconscious. The fault was now, not in the stars, but in that part of ourselves that could not be held responsible. Furthermore, it was claimed that the trouble could be controlled solely by lifting the unconscious quirk to the level of consciousness through psychoanalysis.

To prevent a misunderstanding, let it here be stated unequivocally: There is nothing wrong, there is even something commendable, about a psychological method that cures mental disorders by making the unconscious conscious. And even apart from true derangement, people may be disturbed by a complex that has no ethical or moral cause. In treating such cases, medical science has a vast area in which it can legitimately operate. We are concerned and concerned only with methods of treatment that deny all moral responsibility and attack the patient's admission of personal sin and guilt by telling him that the idea of sin induces morbidity or a guilt complex and makes him abnormal.

Such psychiatrists would make all people nice people, complacent in their freedom from guilt or sin. By one magic stroke, the world would be rid of nasty people, or those who recognize they are sinners. This conception shows a shocking ignorance of human nature. The truth is that there is an increase of mental disorders largely because too many people think they are nice, when really they are nasty. This was the message Our Lord Jesus Christ drove home in the parable of the two men who went into the temple to pray. Paraphrasing the story of the Pharisees (who was a very nice man) we can imagine him praying in the front of the temple as follows: "I thank Thee, O Lord, that my Freudian adviser has told me that there is no such thing as guilt, that sin is a myth, and that Thou, O Father, art only a projection of my father complex. There may be something wrong with my repressed instincts, but there is nothing wrong with my soul. I contribute 10 percent of my income to the Society for the Elimination of Religious Superstitions, and I diet for my figure [fasted] three times a week, Oh, I thank Thee that I am not like the rest of human beings, those nasty people, the sinners who think that his/her soul stands in need of grace. I may have an Oedipus complex, but I have no sin." - Luke 18:9-14 -

The Pharisees who went up to the temple to pray has millions of lineal descendants in this generation who say, "I have no need of a code or a creed." In this they are like the five-year-old child playing the piano who makes up the notes as he goes along; having no standard, he can never be reproached for hitting a 'wrong note." By professing no ideal in morality, these nice people can never be accused of not living up to their Creed. This is the great advantage that they have over Christians - whose Creed is so lofty that they can often and truly be accused of failing to meet its demands.

Very harmful effects can follow accepting the philosophy that denies personal guilt or sin and thereby makes everyone nice. By denying sin, the nice people make a cure impossible. Sin is most serious, and the tragedy is deepened by the denial that we are sinners. If the blind deny that they are blind, how shall they ever see? The really unforgivable sin is the denial of sin because by its nature, there is now nothing to be forgiven. By refusing to admit to personal guilt, the nice people are made into scandalmongers, gossips, talebearers, and super critics, for they must project their real if unrecognized guilt to others. This, again, gives them a new illusion of goodness: The increase of fault finding is in direct ratio and proportion to the denial of sin. (The nasty people do not like to gossip about the failing of others, because they are only too conscious of their own failings.)

It is a fact of human experience that the more experience we have with sin - our own sin - the less we are conscious of it. In all other things, we learn by experience; in sin, we unlearn by experience. Sin gets into the blood, the nerve cells, the brain, the habits, the mind; and the more it penetrates a person, the less he/she knows of its existence. The sinner becomes so accustomed to sin that he fails to recognize its gravity. This was the sinister idea behind Satan's temptation of Eve. Satan told her that if she possessed the knowledge of good and evil, she would be like God. Satan did not tell her the real truth - that God knows evil only negatively, intellectually, as the physician who has never had pneumonia knows it as the negation of health.

But a human being, knowing evil at all, must know it experimentally - that is, evil would enter into his system and become a part of him. As a cataract in the eye blinds the vision, so sin always darkens the intellect and weakens the will and leaves a bias toward the committing of another sin. Each sin makes the next more easy, conscience less reproachful, virtue more distasteful, and the attitude toward morality more scornful. In some persons, sin works like a cancer, undermining and destroying the character for a long time without any visible effects. When the disease becomes manifest, it has progressed so far that one almost gives up the hope of a cure.

Kierkegaard, with his usual penetration, has pointed out there is a despair that humans do not easily understand. It prevails in the sinner who sets himself against God, who wants to be his own god and lawgiver and, hence, to be more that his or any one's nature can permit. He wants desperately to be himself (to possess a fullness of being the like of which is only God's) and as desperately not to be himself (not to be finite creature that he cannot help knowing that he is, however much he may try to conceal this fact from his own consciousness.)

Seldom will a person revolt openly against the Infinite. If someone knows that he has revolted and sinned and still does not accept the consequences, he tries to minimize the sin by excuses, as Cain did. But modern humanity has lost the understanding of the very name "sin." When a person sins and somehow feels the effects (as everyone must) he or she seeks relief in escapist cults escapist habits of drink or drugs. That person also puts the blame for his malaise on his spouse, on his work, on his friends, or on the economic, social, and political order. He will often complain of overwork and "tension" develop symptoms of physical distress - all contrived efforts to avoid facing the fact that he has sinned. He may - frequently does - become a neurotic. If his neurotic has advanced far enough, he will be told by some psychoanalyst that he is not fully responsible for his actions because he is a "patient." This gives him a further pretext for not acknowledging his sins.

If we remain in sin through the denial of sin, despair takes possession of our souls. A sinner can sin so much that he does not recognize the totalitarian character of his sinning. He never considers that the present sin is adding to thousands of other sins. Travelling at seventy miles an hour in an automobile is already excessive; but if twenty more miles are added, the danger mounts. Unrepented sins beget new sins, and the dizzying total brings despair. The soul then says, "I am too far gone." The drunkard becomes afraid of a sober day because of the clarity of vision of his own state that it brings. The greater the depression, the more a sinner needs to escape from it through further sins, until he cries out with Macbeth in his despair,

I had liv'd a blessed time; for, from this instant,
There's nothing serious in mortality,
All is but toys; renown and grace is dead...

The condition of despair induced by unrepented sin often reaches a point where there is a positive fanaticism against religion and morality. Anyone who has fallen away from the spiritual order will hate it, because religion is the reminder of his guilt. Husbands who are unfaithful will beat their wives who are faithful. Wives who are unfaithful will accuse their husbands of infidelity. Such souls finally reach a point where, like Nietzsche, they want to increase evil until all distinction between right and wrong is blotted out. Then they can sin with impunity and say with Nietzsche, "Evil, be thou my good." Expediency can now replace morality, cruelty becomes justice, lust become love. Sin multiplies itself in such a soul until it becomes a permanent residence of Satan, cursed by the Lord Jesus Christ as one of the white sepulchers of this world.

Such is the history of "nice" persons, who believe they never sin.

The nice people do not come to God, because they think they are good through their own merits or bad through inherited instincts. If they do good, they believe they are to receive the credit for it; if they do evil, they deny that it is their own fault. They are good through their own good heartedness, they say; but they are bad because they are misfortunate, either in their economic life or through an inheritance of evil genes from their grand parents. The nice people rarely come to God; they take their moral tone from the society in which they live. Like the Pharisee in the front of the temple, they believe themselves to be very respectable citizens. Elegance is their test of virtue; to them, the moral is the aesthetic, the evil is the ugly. Every move they make is dictated, not by a love of goodness, but by the influence of their age. Their intellects are cultivated - in knowledge of current events. They read only the best-sellers; but their hearts are undisciplined. They say that they would go to Church if the Church were only better - but they never tell you how much better the Church must be before they will join it. They sometimes condemn the gross sins of society, such as murder; they are not tempted to these because they fear the opprobrium that comes to who commit them. By avoiding the sins that society condemns, they escape reproach, they consider themselves good par excellence.

Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ to invective was not badness but just such self-righteous goodness as this. We find no words of condemnation spoken against Magdalene, who was overwhelmed by the problem of sexual promiscuity, or against the penitent thief, who found it difficult to respect possession; but we find Him inveighing against the Scribes and Pharisees, who were nice and self-righteous men. Against them the Lord Jesus Christ pronounced His woes: - Matthew 23:13-36 - The Lord Jesus Christ said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, "Amen I say to you, they have received their reward." - Matt. 6:2 -

They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Lord Jesus Christ indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; the Lord Jesus Christ severe words were saved for those who had sinned and had not been found out. That was why He said to the woman taken in sin, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." - John 8:7 - Only innocence has a right to condemn. The Lord Jesus Christ would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the wine-bibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody's target, and everybody knew that they were wrong.

And people who chose to make war against God, the Lord Jesus Christ were never those whom society had labeled sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among His friends, who sorrowed at His death, were converts drawn from thieves and prostitutes. Those who were aligned against Him were the nice people who stood high in the community - the worldly, prosperous people, the people of wealthy and big business, the judges of law courts who governed by expediency, the "civic-minded" individuals whose true selfishness was veneered over with public generosity. Such people as these opposed God, the Lord Jesus Christ and sent Him to His death.

Why did they hate Him? Because all during His life, He had been tearing the masks of false goodness from nice people, exposing the evil of men and women who lived in accordance with the conventional standards of His time. Finally, a time came when the accused could no longer tolerate His reproaches of what they were. Our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified by the nice people who held that religion was all right in its place, so long as its place was not here, where it might demand of them a change of heart. The Cross of Calvary stands at the crossroads of three prosperous civilizations as eloquent testimony to the uncomfortable truth that the successful people, the social leaders, the people who are labeled nice, are the ones most capable of crucifying the Divine Truth and the Eternal Love.

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.

HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -