Journal
The Human Condition
The human condition is the situation in which every human being finds himself or herself by virtue of being human. This condition contains the experiences that all human beings share, regardless of their sex, age, culture, religion, social status, or time period lived in. As told by Buddha, man is born into a world of suffering and unhappiness, and unfortunately, as Pascal tells us, as humans, we seek nothing but happiness in this world of sin and suffering. For this reason, as humans search for depth and fulfillment through happiness in their lives, we often times tend to lie to ourselves providing a false illusion of what is true. Being human, we are very well capable of deceiving ourselves through euphemistic language which masks the truth and protects us. This ignorance and deception that we create for ourselves exists as a major part of the human condition. Our ignorance, however, can be overcome, if we learn to "revise our maps",worldviews and mindsets often devloped in childhood(M. Scott Peck), and learn to understand that we tend to be ignorant, or "in the cave", about certain things. However, this can often times tend to be a very difficult and painful process. Even though we may search for happiness, however, humans tend to share an "unideal existance" in which the desire for happiness goes unfilled and we are left alienated, bored, and often times pessismistic about life's offerings or perhaps even God. However, as Fromm tells us, "man is gifted with reason" and we must pass evil off as the mere privation of good. It is our free-will that creates evil, just as it led to original sin--the Fall of Man. To live more fulfilled lives, we must seek out the truth and attempt to push away from the ignorance of this human condition.
Three Important Ideas of the Section:
1.Concupiscence means that even though we, as humans, desire goodness, we are mysteriously attracted toward evil. St. Paul once said, "I do not understand what I do. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate..." St. Paul, like many people, intended good but was drawn towards misleading actions of evil that did not match his original desire. How many times as humans do we tell ourselves to not do a certain thing and then, unexpectedly, we find that we have done it anway despite our good intentions. For instance, in the Cat Steven's song "Cats in the Cradles," the father did not intend to raise his son in the manner that he did, having no time for a true relationship, however, despite his best intentions, the son described in the song, was raised outside of a close-knit relationship with his father. The consequence of concupiscence is that our good intentions by themselves are not enough to save us from our human condition.
2.The philosophical and logical question regarding the problem of evil has challenged the existance of God for many years. Many wonder how can God exist if there is evil in the world and why, if God is all-loving would he create this evil. Taking a logical approach at the question, it is easily proven that there is no God. St. Augustine and C.S. Lewish approached the problem in this manner: If God is all-good, then he would desire nothing but good and if God is all-powerful than his desire for only goodness could be fulfilled. Therefore, God is either not all-powerful, not all-good, or possibly both. While logically, this easily makes sense, we as humans must realize that evil is not created. It is merely the privation of good due to our free will as humans. It is the absense of goodness.
3. The term original sin refers to the fallen sate-of-being, or damaged human condition, in which we exist as a result of the Fall of Man. As Christians, we believe that there was once a period of time, known as Original Justice, when the world was untouched by the evil of sin. Humans shared a very close relationship with God. Evil, unfortunately, was introduced to the world through human sin. While we are unsure who committed the first sin, what it was, or how long ago it was, we believe that this ruptured our intimate relationship with God. This event was known as the Fall of Man. This means, as part of the human condition, that we are all born into a world corrupt with sin and confusion, an unideal existance.
Images of Key Ideas:
Question to think about:
Are humans truly evil by nature? If so, what makes us this way? Is there any way that God could have given us free will and that evil would not have existed?
While I am truly unsure of what makes humans evil by nature(assuming that this is the side that I take), I tend to believe that our pursuit of hapiness leads to our evilness. Our desire for happiness left alone can turn into selfishness, an evil quality. This, like an animal instinct, can lead to the intrinsic evil of humans.
While I believe that all is possible with God, if he were to give us free will, and to eliminate evil, then there would of had to be some limit on our will-power, causing it to be not completely free-will. However, as I answer most of my theological questions, I believe that the human mind is incapable of understanding something like this about God since we have known nothing like this before.