Happy 2013 everyone!
I thought I’d dropped out of Christianity long ago, but yesterday, New Year’s Day, I noticed I’ve been living in Original Sin my whole life. What a shock!
I was driving home from Red Bluff, it was a beautiful evening, the sky deep blue above me, the trees black against a horizon glowing like flame. I was admiring this beauty when I suddenly noticed that I was seeing it all through a subtle film of guilt – a guilt that was definitely not part of the sky and the trees.
It was like an underlying assumption that I had done something wrong. An assumption, I saw with surprise, that I had been overlaying on reality all my life, and that had me living in a state of tension, always on guard, ready to hide.
I had never noticed the guilt before; in fact I had long congratulated myself on being relatively guilt-free. Now I was stunned to see that I had been swallowing the idea of my own guilt my whole life, just as if I believed in “original sin.”
Even more interesting, I saw that this was hooked to the concept of Right and Wrong itself, which I had endowed with the power of natural law – and now it was clear that there was nothing natural about it. Even right and wrong were nothing but a judgment I had inherited, a phantasm without substance.
These assumptions about guilt and right and wrong are still there of course, but at least I’ve seen them for what they are: the whispered incantation that the Devil has been muttering in my ear all these years!
