"America, and The World, has a Sin Problem." -- Why....? Because All Lif...
"If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door."
Well, I looked at lots of translations for this.
Actually, the next line is,
"And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him."
Alex :
No. No! NO!
Stop it! Stop it, please!
I beg you! This is sin!
This is sin! This is sin!
It's a sin, it's a sin, it's a sin!
Dr. Brodsky :
SIN?
WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT SIN?
Alex :
That! Using Ludwig van like that!
He did no harm to •anyone•.
Beethoven just wrote music!
Dr. Branom :
Are you referring to the background score...?
Alex :
Yes!!!
Dr. Branom :
You've heard Beethoven before?
Alex :
Yes!!!
Dr. Brodsky :
So, you're keen on music?
Alex :
YES!!!
[ Here comes the Rational-Liberal Torture Justification]
Dr. Brodsky :
Can't be helped.
Here's The Punishment Element perhaps.
Yes. What God actually says is something like this… "Things aren’t going so well for you, but if you were behaving properly, they would. But, instead, this is what you’ve done. Sin came to your door, and sin means to pull your arrow back and to miss the target. Sin came to your door. But he uses a metaphor. The metaphor is something like, "Sin came to your door like this sexually aroused cat-predator thing, and you invited it in. And then you let it have its way with you."
It’s like you entered into a creative — he uses a sexual metaphor. "You entered into a creative exchange with it, and gave birth to something as a consequence.
What you gave birth to, that’s Your Life. And you knew it.
You’re self-conscious, after all. You knew you were doing this. You conspired with this thing to produce the situation that you’re in.
Jung said something similar about the Oedipal mother situation. What he said was very politically incorrect. Of course, every single he wrote was politically incorrect. That’s how you could tell that he was a thinker, by the way. He talked about the unholy alliance between hyper-dependent children and their mothers. He said, well, it’s actually—Freud thought about it as a maternal thing. I’m not putting Freud down. Freud mapped out the Oedipal situation brilliantly. I’m not putting Freud down. But, you know, Jung was taking the ideas and expanding them outward. He said that there as actually an unholy alliance between a hyper-dependent child and an Oedipal, over-dependent mother. The alliance was, the mother would always offer—so maybe the kid is supposed to go off and do something that would require a little bit of courage and effort. The mother says, well, are you sure you’re feeling well enough to do it? And then the child could say, yes, or the child could say no. But the thing is, the child made the damn decision, too. You might think, well, that’s pretty harsh. But just because children are little, that doesn’t mean they’re stupid.
You don’t know children if you don’t know how children know how to manipulate. They are staggeringly good at that. They’re studying you nonstop, trying to figure out, A, what you’re up to, and B, how they can get what they want in the way that they want it. They can play a manipulative game, no problem, especially if they’re well schooled in it. It’s sort of like that. Maybe the mother is a little timid and a little inclined to over-protect, and maybe the child is a little manipulative, and a little willing to not take that courageous step out into the world, and to regress into infantile dependency, instead. Then you get a terrible dynamic building across time that is like a vicious circle, or like a positive feedback loop. It just expands and expands and expands. Sometimes, in families, you see a hyper-dependent child and a perfectly independent child, and the same mother. Mothers are very complex, and mother for child A and mother for child B are not the same mother, even if they happen to be the same human being. The literature’s quite clear on that, but you get my point.
God’s idea was that, not only are you not doing well, but you’re not doing well because you’ve actually really spent a lot of work figuring out how to not do well. This is like creative effort on your part. If you want to read about truly malevolent people, you could start with the Columbine killers. They left some very interesting diaries behind. I would recommend them. There’s plenty of serial killers you could read about, and the people who’ve really gone out and done dark things. I’ve read more than my fair share of that sort of thing, and I understand it quite well. If you really want to have your countenance fall and be wroth, 10 years of brooding on your own catastrophe, sort of alone, and letting your fantasies take shape, and egging them on, allowing them to flourish and, let’s say, take possession of you…That’s exactly the right way to think about it. That will get you somewhere like this. There are more people who are like that than you think, and you’re more like that than you think.
So, Cain is obviously not very happy about this whole answer. The last thing you want to hear if your life has turned into a catastrophe and you take God to task for creating a universe where that sort of thing was allowed, is that it’s your own damn fault, and that you should straighten up and fly right, so to speak, and that you shouldn’t be complaining about the nature of being. But that is the answer he gets. Then what happens? Well, we have to infer that, if Cain was angry before, he’s a lot more angry now. Of course, that’s exactly what the story reveals.... "
The Seven Works of Corporeal Mercy
- Bury The Dead
- Visit The imprisoned
- Feed The Hungry
- Shelter The Homeless
- Clothe The Naked
- Visit The Sick
- Refresh The Thirsty
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