I keep coming across people talking about the argument over human nature: whether people are inherently good or inherently evil. People fall on either side of the fence. Some people fall exactly where you expect them to fall and some people fall on the exact opposite side of where you would have thought.
It seems like the topic comes up all the time, but two distinct ones that I can remember are podcast episodes by Mike Slater and Charlie Kirk. Mike Slater addressed the issue on his Politics by Faith podcast. He released a series of episodes starting with this one,
and going on with about three more episodes after that. He does a good job unpacking the issue in a succinct way. He clearly falls on the side of humans being inherently evil. He argues that they can only act in a good way through training and effort. Charlie Kirk’s example is when he used his podcast to interview Dennis Prager about the nature of evil and whether thinking bad thoughts was evil or only doing bad actions. I think both Kirk and Prager consider mankind to be naturally evil, but they seem to differ on what evil actually is.
The magnum opus on the issue of sin, guilt, evil, and the human heart came in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus said, among other things,
You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment;
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“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Often, we interpret these convicting statements to mean something along the lines of, “You know you should not get angry enough to kill, but you should not get angry at all,” and “You know you should not commit adultery, but you should not even imagine committing adultery.” But these sentiments do not seem to be what Jesus is getting at. Rather, he is unveiling the sheer wickedness of the human heart and the drastic difference between how we judge it an how God judges it.
The secular humanist philosophy of the day tries to separate God’s ideals from himself and say that people are naturally “good,” as if there is somehow a standard for good outside of God. They understand what a good person is even though they believe in moral relativism where everyone can choose for himself what is “good.” Setting aside that glaring inconsistency, they would say that the vast majority of people do not want to do wrong and the few who do have somehow been corrupted by society, or some other external force. They measure goodness by cherry picking a person’s “best” thoughts and actions as the measure of his virtue. This is why they promote virtue signaling. In this worldview, you want to get credit for those thoughts and actions by which you want to be judged. Then they slant the scales even farther. They judge your good intentions rather than your good actions. Maybe your actions were not so good, but it’s the thought that counts… All the other mistakes — the dirty underbelly of your life — that does not come into the calculation. Nobody’s perfect all the time, so you throw the mistakes away. Like gymnasts, they assume we get to pick our top two performances on which to base our score. This is a type of evaluation and judgement process with which Jesus fundamentally disagrees.
Murder is an extreme action and often categorized as the epitome of evil. We avoid committing that action and count ourselves as good people — much better than those murderers. Jesus effectively says, “Have you ever been angry with someone and wished that they were dead? Then your heart is the same as the murderer’s.” He reveals that the only difference between the murderer and the angry person is the external circumstances.
We do not consider how much external forces shape our actions. We do not consider how laws, social stigma, and physical barriers inhibit some of the most egregious actions we could imagine taking. The common man would not even seriously consider murdering a neighbor or coworker with whom he is angry, but what if he were a trained assassin? What if he could conceivably perform the task without much trouble? What if he lived in a society that cared nothing for the sanctity of life and praised a murderer for his strength of body and will? What if he were an all-powerful king able to determine life or death with a wave of his hand — one whose every will was deemed right and whose command was law? If there were absolutely no costs and no repercussions, the same man who otherwise would not even imagine murder might carry it out without a second thought. Our hearts drive drastically different actions depending upon our circumstances.
From God’s point of view, both men are murderers. How can the inhibited man be any less guilty than the uninhibited one? God cares about what happens in the heart. He will not hold a man less guilty simply because that man was not able to carry out the desires of his heart. God judges us by what kind of people we are, not by what temporal circumstances happen to surround us. It is God’s mercy that most people’s lives are inhibited from acting upon our evil impulses. The world is a better place because of it. But this does not change the assessment of the state of our hearts in God’s eyes.
Stripping away the distinction of circumstances and inhibiting factors brings the awful recognition that Jesus’ words about us are completely true. Our sinful hearts are as bad as those who happen to act out upon their wicked desires. The man who looks at a woman with lustful thoughts is simply an adulterer who has not yet had the ideal opportunity to act it out. People judge themselves as righteous for their actions, but God judges the heart. And here we must, in the end, accept the fact that our hearts are hopelessly wicked — of the same quality as our antediluvian ancestors where “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
People argue about whether or not humans are inherently evil. The only reason there is an argument is that we are not honest with ourselves and we excuse ourselves too readily and easily. We have a thought about stealing or cheating, and we resist it. We consider the consequences and decide not to act out on the impulse (at least if we are civilized and rational). We each deposit a little merit into our internal bank account because of our proven virtue. Jesus shakes us and tells us that the process did not prove our virtue. It proved our depravity. It proved the absolute wickedness into which society would descend if we did not have God’s merciful barriers and inhibitions preventing us from following all the whims of our hearts. If your friend tells you, “I thought about killing you last week but decided not to,” you do not think about what a good person your friend is for not doing it. You think, “What kind of person are you who thinks about killing people?” More than just what we do, God judges what kind of people we are, and our sinful thoughts prove that we are the sinful kind of people. They prove why the only tenable posture of the Christian heart is one of continual repentance.
Agreed. Without barriers put in place by society and culture people will always be pulled towards evil. Even parameters in society don't solve the problem if those parameters are based on Judeo-Christian values. Just look at Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or China (in the past and today). If evil is acceptable in the parameters of society, people will willingly (and sometimes happily) go along with them.