“A sin without
volition is
a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: That which
is
outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.
If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he
has
no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold,
as
man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To
hold
man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a
crime
he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him
guilty
in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To
destroy
morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a
feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of
your
code.
Do not hide
behind
the cowardly
evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil.
A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It
forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear
responsibility
and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a
tendency
that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he
cannot
possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.
What is the
nature
of the
guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man
acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth
declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a
mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil
– he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his
labor
– he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire –
he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they
damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy – all the cardinal
values
of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is
designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as
his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was – that
robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values,
without labor, without love he was not man.”
Excerpt of John Galt’s
Speech by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.