Forgive Me, Father, for I Have Sinned

 

Yesterday I wrote on the nature of original sin and “original blessedness.” “Man is born to love, but learns fear,” the theme of a recent talk I attended, is wrong. Man is born with an inclination to sin.  Nor is this inclination eliminated b baptism, nor by faith in Christ. As the Bible says, we must “work out our salvation in fear and trembling.” 

Even leaving aside the Bible, consider the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.”

“The whole of man's history has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God's grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.” (Gaudium et Spes, 37 § 2). 

Of the heresy of Pelagianism, the Catechism notes: “Pelagius held that man could, by the natural power of free will and without the necessary help of God's grace, lead a morally good life; he thus reduced the influence of Adam's fault to bad example.”

Which is what our sermonizer of the last post did: he reduced original sin to the example of our parents.

“Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature, inclined to evil,” the Catechism warns, “gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action and morals.”

This is the fatal flaw in left-wing thinking since Rousseau. His notion of original blessedness led to the excesses of the French Revolution, Romanticism, Marx and Communism. It fosters the tragic mirage of a paradise on earth, created by human effort. It has killed tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions in the attempt.

To give the Devil his turn at the podium, our speaker cited the parable of the Prodigal Son as evidence of God’s readiness to forgive.

The prodigal spent all his inheritance. Yet his father, representing God the Father, did not reject him, but welcomed him home and killed a fatted calf in his honour.

The first common misunderstanding is that the son’s fault was in taking his inheritance and leaving home. No, it was being prodigal—that is, he spent all his inheritance. ”He squandered his property in reckless living.”

And it is essential to notice that he did not just come running to Abba to be embraced. Like Job, he repented in dust and ashes. He prepared this speech for his father, and delivered it: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.” 

God cannot forgive our sins unless we are both fully repentant and prepared to accept just punishment. No Get out of Jail Free. This is the step the evil ones always elide in the telling.

Compare the Good Thief, who died on a cross next to Jesus. He was granted heaven despite his sins. 

Why? 

Because he accepted that his punishment was deserved and just. He rebuked the third thief, who mocked Jesus: “Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes.”

This is why the sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation includes penance. This is why there is a purgatory, or we must believe there is. Only then can we hope for God’s forgiveness. We cannot expect it. “Thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Nor is the repentant prodigal of the parable, significantly, going to get another inheritance to replace the one he squandered. Too many miss this, wanting to stress forgiveness. He does not achieve equal standing with the brother who had not sinned. When the son who had remained objected to the feast his errant sibling was getting in his honour, the father responded by telling him, “all that is mine is yours.” 

That, surely, suggests that the prodigal gets no second inheritance. He gets, no doubt, secure food and lodging; but will remain now forever a lodger.

In terms of the afterlife, this suggests that the repentant sinner achieves heaven, the Divine Presence, reconciled to God. But there are ranks in heaven. We know this from the listed ranks of angels, the reference in Revelations to those “close to the throne,” and Jesus’s reference to “the least in heaven” when speaking of John the Baptist. 

He, the repentant sinner, will be given no authority.

God does not spoil his children.

Original Blessedness and Original Sin

 

I am disturbed by a Catholic sermon I listened to recently. The repeated theme was “you were born for love, but learned fear.” The audience was given to understand that God’s love for us is infinite and unconditional, and our existential problem was simply not understanding that Daddy, “Abba,” is always here ready to embrace us.

The clear message being that guilt, not sin, is the problem. Spoken like Martin Luther, who famously declared, “Love God, and sin boldly.” The speaker was a convert from Protestantism, and he may have brought Luther’s sola fides doctrine with him: salvation by faith alone.

He was preaching ”original blessedness” instead of original sin. In fact, his slogan seems to echo Rousseau’s in praising the natural man: “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Rousseau’s philosophy was in direct and deliberate opposition to the Christian message. 

The doctrine of original blessedness faces an obvious problem: if each of us is born innately good, how did evil ever come into the world?

The speaker did address this problem. We learn fear from our parents. This is the “original sin.” Our parents are scary, presumably because they do not show unconditional love for us, and we project this lack of love on our image of God.

But this does not solve the problem: it’s turtles all the way down. How did Adam and Eve ever sin, then, since they had no parent to falsely teach them to fear, only God himself?

Adam and Eve feared God because they had sinned. And so this inclination to sin must also be in us. 

The speaker had skipped an essential step, like those Protestant churches that will not display a crucifix, but only an empty cross: they want the resurrection without the crucifixion. He made the original sin fearing God, which is to say, feeling guilt over having sinned.

Compare what the Bible says:

Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

And Saint Paul:

“Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

We are not born blessed, ready and able to love. We are born fallen, imagining like Eve that we are gods, and must learn to love. It is a hard and painful process; one that needs divine intervention.

And the first step is to learn to fear. 

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.”

My grandmother used to recite Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven.”

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’”

God treats us like a father, not a too-indulgent mother. He does not spoil his children.

I Was Still a Child

 

“I was still a child.”

The black girl in the red dress was singing for coins in front of the Dollarama. Beside her was a hand-drawn whiteboard giving her name, Keira, and an explanation. “I am suffering from depression and anxiety. All I have left is my voice.” 

And I knew it was true. I could hear it in her voice. She sang so sweet, so high and yet so deep. 

You need to suffer for a voice like that.

She deserved those coins more than any banker or store manager or dentist in the mall.

“I was still a child.”

That is the original tragedy of life: we are raised by humans. Every parent fails us, some maliciously, some with good intentions. As children, we cannot understand this. We believe, and we trust. We accept as right and normal whatever upbringing we are given. 

If we are told we are vermin, we believe it forever. If we are told we have no right to live, we believe it. If we are told we live only to give pleasure to the parent, we believe it. If we are not loved, we conclude we are unlovable.

The tragedy of black America is not the aftereffects of slavery 160 years ago. That’s absurd. Neither is it the aftereffects of Jim Crow three generations ago. It is the failure of the black family. It is kids raised with no father, heedless parents, or some predatory male boyfriend in place of a father; or kids given no moral guidance.

The tragedy of Canadian Indians is not residential schools two generations ago. It is not the loss of some imaginary culture in which you could talk to animals and trees. It is the failure, aided and abetted by welfare dependency, of the indigenous family. It is teenage girls desperate to escape their home situation, who too often die in the attempt; it is bands of kids on isolated reserves planning to commit suicide because they see no escape from “adult bullying.”

These subcultures have failed in parenting. 

But not they alone; it also happens in the best of families.

I used to know a couple of schizophrenics who mostly lived on the street and were in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I cannot tell you their last names, because almost anyone in Canada would recognize them. 

I knew a family up the hill in Westmount, then the poshest address in Canada, one of whose adolescent sons locked himself in a closet and set himself on fire.

Another kid I knew, from one of the best families in town, broke into a doctor’s office, and swallowed every pill he could find.

The “great families” are often as abusive to children as the poorest ones. The problem is not caused by poverty, but by parental sin. Great families regularly devour at least one child a generation, as if a ritual sacrifice. Think of Rosemary Kennedy. Think of the Emperor Claudius and the family of Caesar Augustus. 

Worse are the children raised not to be abused, to become scapegoats, but raised to abuse. Every dysfunctional family, unless there is only one child, seems to have both. It is these latter who pass on the original sin unto the next generation; the little Cains. They are groomed to believe that they are special, and deserve to get whatever they want. They will go on to abuse the next generation. And so the tragedy is repeated, generation to generation.

“Whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5And whoever welcomes a little child like this in My name welcomes Me.

6But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

7Woe to the world for the causes of sin. These stumbling blocks must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!”

There has been a black girl singing in front of Dollarama for all of human history. No doubt there will be, until the Second Coming.

Original Sin

 

Lots of us have trouble with the concept of original sin; including the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand." Paragraph 404.

After all, it doesn’t seem fair—that one person should suffer for the sins of another.

Indeed, it is not fair; but it is the essence of the Christian message. Jesus died for our sins.

And it is obviously, objectively true. We all benefit and suffer from the actions of others: our ancestors, our countrymen, most obviously, our parents. Some of us were lucky enough to be born in a rich family, some in a poor one. That has given us a better shot. We had nothing to do with that, and it is not fair. Some of us have had abusive parents, and some of us have had parents who coddled or spoiled us. That is not fair. Some of us were born in Canada, and some of us in Ukraine. We had nothing to do with it.

All of us trace our lineage back to Adam and Eve. Having sinned, and departed from original innocence, they passed this on to their children through imperfections in their upbringing. So we have Cain murdering Abel. Cain or Seth passed the seed of bad upbringing on to their children, who passed it on to theirs, on to Noah, who passed it on to Shem, Japheth, and Ham, who passed in on to the children of Lot, who passed it on to those responsible for founding Canada or the Ukraine, who passed it on to our parents, who passed it on to us. 

It is, necessarily, in all cases, essentially sin. It is only relative degrees of sin. All far short of original perfection, and so all fall short of proper parenting. All children suffer from bad parenting, to greater or to lesser degree. This is why Philip Larkin wrote:

“They fuck you up, your mom and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.”

 

Not to excuse parents—all parenting is not equal. Some parents are also intentionally evil. This is why Jesus says, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

This is a fundamental problem. This is the original problem. Because we are naturally inclined, as children, to see our parents as the measure of all things, as our ground of being, the source of truth and morals, as gods. Accordingly, the errors and the sins they tempt us to are difficult to erase, and probably require divine intervention. It is the first and most dangerous idolatry.

This is why the Bible says, more than once, that “the sins of the father are visited upon the sons, unto the third and fourth generation.” This is why, when one prospective Christian wants first to bury his father, Jesus says “let the dead bury their own dead.” This is why we must be born again. We must fight free of the taint of our upbringing.

The Christian message has often been perverted to be one of “family values.” That is not in the Bible; that is the opposite of the Biblical message

“Honour your father and your mother,” yes. But that means support them in their old age, and ungrudgingly. Idolizing them is the greater danger. It is comparable to idolizing your motherland. We know from Nuremberg where that leads. But idolizing a parent is a greater risk than idolizing your motherland.

It is the original sin.

Too Many People

 

Friend Xerxes notes that he finds individuals almost invariably kind, while society as a whole is systemically at least nearsighted.

I am completely in agreement with his claim that individuals are more trustworthy than people in groups. What he presumably does not see is that this, if true, is a powerful argument for free markets and individual liberty, as opposed to government control and group identity. In other words, for the right and not the left.

Xerxes, on the other hand, is probably trying to argue for original blessedness; for the idea that people are innately, naturally good, and will always do good if they just follow their instincts—a romantic notion, in the proper sense of the word. Therefore, impositions on instinct from “society”—formal ethics—are the source of all evil.

But the basic claim, that individuals are usually more trustworthy than groups, is in accord with what we all can observe: mobs are irresponsible and dangerous. 

The problem is with identifying the mechanism to explain this. If you assume that people are all individually good, yet corrupted by society, you have a classic “problem of evil.” Society is a human creation. If people are good, yet society is evil, where did the evil come from?

Xerxes’s theory is that people are good only in moderation. The evil comes somehow from there being too many in one place. He uses, among others, the analogy of a campfire versus a forest fire. Too much fire is bad; too many people are bad.

But the difference between a campfire and a forest fire is not quite that. It is that the campfire is under control, and the forest fire is not. A fire in a waste paper basket is probably smaller than a campfire, but it is still bad. A controlled burnoff of a field is a common agricultural practice, and it might easily be larger than a forest fire. A nuclear reactor is a rather bigger fire in a sense than a forest fire, but can be useful.

So with people. The problem is not more or fewer of them, but whether they are controlling their animal instincts and their selfishness. As individuals, we are obliged to take responsibility for our acts, so our conscience is engaged. If we pass our individual responsibility over to the group, we can more easily shirk our conscience. We can let our sinister tendencies “run riot,” to use the familiar phrase. This is most evident in a mob, but a clear danger in any group. “I was only following orders.”

This is because, like fire, we already have those sinister tendencies. This cannot support a romantic idea of original blessedness. The bad tendency must already exist at the individual level; but be held in check.

Trying to find an analogy that might work better to justify Xerxes’s concept of innate human goodness, I thought of locusts. According to at least some theories, they change from relatively benign to humans to a plague due to overcrowding—due, then, to sheer numbers, more or less. But again, this does not really work in support of his concept of humans, because each individual locust also transforms in nature. In Xerxes’s human model, the individual remains good even as the society in which he or she participates misbehaves.

I have read that lab rats, if overcrowded, begin to bite one another. Perhaps this is more apt, but it still does not work. Each bite is an individual, not a group, action. The individual does not remain moral while the group imposes immorality.

Given the correct observation that people behave better individually than in groups, we are left needing to acknowledge the concept of original sin. The tendency to evil as well as good must be innate at the level of the individual.

There is also something troublesome, surely, in the very concept of “too many” humans. Too many for what? If your measure is what is good for humans, surely existing is the most fundamental of goods. If your standard is not what is good for humans, what is your standard? The obvious suspicion is that it is what is good for yourself…

Sex as Original Sin

Friend Xerxes interestingly simply assumes that the sin in the Garden of Eden was sex. He is not alone. As another friend of mine used to jape, “It wasn’t the apple on the tree; it was the pair on the ground.”

There is no textual warrant for this. Whatever “eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” might mean in literal terms, there is no reason to see sex there. One would presumably need to assume that the Bible follows a strict Victorian morality, insisting on speaking of sex only very obliquely.

This is anachronistic. The Victorians were historically quite unusual in their prudery. And, after all, Genesis has no trouble naming the act in Genesis 4.

More significantly, there is the obvious point that, for any Jew or Christian, there would have been nothing sinful about Adam and Eve having sex. Their union had been formally declared before God. What conceivable moral system would object?

I suspect that this nonsensical association of sex with the original sin is a Trojan horse—pun not intended― to justify general immorality. Precisely because Adam and Eve having sex would be perfectly innocent, the implication is that all sin is really okay.

Xerxes himself goes on, ominously, to assert that the existence of sin is entirely God’s fault. He complains of “sins that grandpa God set up in the first place.” Note the plural.

Then Mr. X objects to the notion that God would play favourites in war. God has no righteous reason, then, to fuss over whether Hitler won World War II, or the South won the US Civil War. He presumably would not or should not take sides, either, if some gang breaks into your home to rape and steal. Or he is just being a troublemaker.

One can perhaps see from this, in miniature, why we have rioting and looting in the streets in the US right now, and where this all came from. We can trace it back through the sexual revolution of the 1950s, to Freud’s application of Darwinism to the human soul.

Back to the Garden?

St. John sees the New Jerusalem

My good friend Darius wants to argue that the goal of creation is to return to the Garden of Eden.

I disagree. I think there is a fundamental conceptual flaw here. The Garden is Eden is simply a state without sin. Being without sin is not the goal. No one is without sin. The goal is to demonstrate virtue.

Heaven is described in the last book of the Bible. It is not a garden. It is a city. It is not a return to nature, but a triumph of culture.

Darius argues that salvation is salvation from sin, and so it implies a return to the time before sin.

“Salvation means being restored to a position before having been needed to be saved.”

This sounds reasonable; but is it true?

Consider this analogy: you are booked on the Titanic. The Titanic hits an iceberg and goes down at sea. You, unlike Leonardo di Caprio, are saved.

Does this salvation mean you are taken back to Belfast, the point at which you embarked? Does it mean you are back in your stateroom on the Titanic, as it was before it hit the iceberg?

No; that would have been less desirable than to be dropped safely off in New York harbour.

Your house is on fire. To save you, is it necessary for the fire department to reconstruct the house to the condition it was in before the fire, and put you back in? Is it even a good idea? Wouldn’t it be better to rebuild on a firmer basis?

Would you reconstruct a bridge that has fallen down, exactly as it was before it fell?

Salvation rarely involves being restored to the position before having been needed to be saved. If it does, this is irrelevant to salvation.

But another analogy is better for speaking of the Fall. It is the classic situation of a hero legend.

An innocent maiden is about to be eaten by a dragon. Call her Eve. A brave knight appears, slays the serpent, and saves the maiden. They marry and live happily ever after.

You might argue that both knight and maiden would have been better off had the dragon never existed. But if it had never existed, they also would never have met. The brave knight would never have been able to prove his virtue, his valour, and his love.

These are the positive virtues the Fall allows us to express; and it allows both us and God to demonstrate our love for one another.

Would the world be better without brave knights, fair maidens, heroism, heroic virtue, legends and stories, and true love? Would the world be better without art?

If the issue was merely avoiding sin, then animals and small children are the ideal. Neither, after all, are capable of sin. And God could have easily left the world in Edenic happiness, simply by not allowing free will. As soon as he allowed free will, it was a statistical certainty that man would eventually sin. And not just a statistical certainty: God is omniscient. He knew man would sin, and could have prevented it in this way.

But do any of us think it is best to remain a child forever? Does anyone believe that a random water buffalo is morally superior to Mother Teresa? Do any of us think God made a mistake?

Arguing that there is free will without sin in heaven, Darius raises a good and interesting point: “This can be proven logically if we agree on the following axiom: when we proceed into the heavenly realm after this time on earth, we can expect to continue to be capable of exercising free will.”

But consider the angels.

Like us, they have free will. However, the angels chose once and forever for or against God, and, having done so, their thoughts and actions are consistent. It is unthinkable for Gabriel to tell lies.

It seems we each face this same angelic choice, confirmed at death. I imagine it is especially meaningful to sin in the divine presence. Adam and Eve sinned when God was not apparent, and felt shame when he reappeared. We each face the divine presence at death.

Why is an earthly life necessary? Why not just have us all born into heaven? Our earthly life must be a triage, separating out those who, given free will, will choose evil, from those who, given free will, will choose good, when in the divine presence and aware unambiguously of the significance of their choice. Without this time of trial, it is impossible to have a heaven in which we are all allowed free will.

Family Values and Original Sin

We often talk about maternal instinct. But there is a far more powerful instinct that we never talk about. Filial instinct. When have you ever even heard the term?

A mother, or a father, are naturally attached to their children. But the natural instinct of attachment is far stronger in a child to their parents.

We often marvel at some animal nursing young of another species. We never think to marvel at the young accepting succor from another species. That we rightly take as spontaneous.

We honour and make much of maternal instinct, therefore, precisely because it is sometimes absent. That makes it noticeable, and worthy of celebration when seen. By contrast, we can simply assume filial instinct in all cases. So it goes unnoticed and unremarked.

Think about it. In the early, vulnerable infancy of any higher species, the parent is everything. Evolution and the imperatives of survival will imprint a deep need for closeness to the parent. Closeness, trust, obedience.

So baby ducks line up spontaneously to follow their mother wherever she goes. If the mother is absent, they will line up to follow whatever else is available. So with the young of almost any species, up to and including the higher primates. A motherless baby chimpanzee can be consoled with a hot water bottle. A baby human is soothed by a plastic nipple.

This is instinct; it has no moral dimension. Yet it is so powerful we want to hold it sacred: we talk of “family values” and “filial piety” as though these were religious duties. Indeed, much of Chinese folk religion can be summed up in the phrase “ancestor worship.”

This simply makes us feel good about ourselves, because we are going to do it anyway. There is a moral debt owed to parents for their material and emotional support in our childhood; we have a duty to similarly support them in their age. But that is all.

In fact, the vital moral issue cuts the other way. To idolize a parent, a mere human, is just that: an idolatry. The average parent is necessarily only average, not better or worse. Some parents will be very good people; some parents will be very bad people.

To adhere too closely to “family values” is just like adhering too closely to tribal values: to believing that your nation, or your race, is inherently superior to all others. We know where that leads, and we call it racism. The worst evils in history, we commonly hold, are done because of racism. “Familyism” is in principle the same thing.

Morality, therefore, requires cutting through the instinctive tie to viewing our parents objectively. Doing so is almost the essential act of morality: not doing so is leaving yourself in the state of original sin—the sin one inherits from one’s ancestors. 

Adamant Eve

Not the apple on the tree, but the pair on the ground.

We may have all been missing something.

The Gospel reading at mass this Sunday was the woman taken in adultery. “Then I do not condemn you either. Go and sin no more.” God will forgive our sins if we are truly sorry.

My painfully bright eleven-year-old daughter picked up on this. So what would have happened if Adam and Eve had said they were sorry? Wouldn’t God have forgiven them? End of salvation history. Pre-emptive end for the suffering of the ages.

It seems to me she has to be right. Has God changed his nature for the New Testament? God does not change. So wouldn’t he have done the same then?

And no, the atonement cannot have made the difference. Jesus forgives the adulterous woman before the atonement. Jesus, being of one substance with the Father, is of one will with the Father. And he too was present then, at the Creation.

It seems we are generally focused on the wrong thing when we tell about the Garden of Eden. We think the critical thing was Eve eating the apple. It wasn’t. Given free will, sin is certain to happen. But God can forgive any sin. Nevertheless, when God came to Adam and Eve for an account, instead of admitting to sin, expressing regret and asking forgiveness, they hid in the bushes: childish denial. And when God, knowing of course what had happened, confronted Adam, Adam still would not repent. He said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” He immediately tried to blame Eve, and to blame God! Anyone but himself.

Then when God asked Eve in turn, she blamed the serpent. “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” No repentance. “The Devil made me do it.”

This was the real sin.

It seems to necessarily follow too that Adam and Eve never repented, but went to their graves, and to Hell, without admitting their original sin. At least, never repented before having children. Otherwise the end times would have been in their lifetimes.

This explains how original sin, initially personal, can affect all subsequent generations: by parents, generation to generation, modelling this obstinacy in sin to their children. Kids learn so much from their parents. Adam and Eve seem to have passed this attitude on to their own sons, for Cain picks up the theme and accepts eternal exile rather than repent. His complaint to God that someone might kill him, and demand for protection, suggests a continuing lack of repentance. He is denying the justice of his punishment. Noah, for that matter, once he survives the Flood meant to wipe out all evil in the world, loses no time in remodeling the trait to his own sons. Caught drunk and naked in his tent, rather than finding any fault in himself, he curses one of his sons for noticing. And so the cycle starts again. It is the world-taint.

What we call original sin in each individual soul appears then to be our tendency, like our first parents, not to repent our sins, but to deny and double down. To err is only human. To refuse to admit error when we err puts us definitively in the Devil’s party.

And Jesus had to come to end this obstinacy. 

Condemned sinner at Last Judgement: Sistine Chapel.

This is perhaps why Jesus said the end times had begun, within the lifetimes of some of those listening. Because if any one of us accepts Jesus’s message of atonement and forgiveness, and repents, we have personally entered these end times. The eternal curse is lifted. The truth has set us free.

But necessarily, since the death of Adam and Eve, and barring another universal cataclysm like the Flood, it can only be lifted one by one. For if any one of us gets beyond this and learns to repent, that still leaves the taint with everyone else who was brought up in a human family. Not all families are equal—far from it—but no family is ideal, either.

Yes, at some point, the General Judgement, everyone will be called to account and all accounts settled. This is the said second universal cataclysm. One imagines it has been delayed until a larger portion of humanity has the opportunity to repent and not to be condemned.

It is so easy to say you’re sorry. And so few do it.