Original Sin 2
Posted by t on 20 July, 2008
“If we bracket the explanation that we inherit the ability and inclination and inevitability of doing such, how can we explain the presence of sin in everyone?”
If there’s no theological answer then it must be biological or humanistic……For the humanist perspective I thought I’d check out Carl Rogers.
Here’s a quote from William Coulson about working with Rogers introducing person-centred counselling to a Californian holy order and the chaos that ensued. It doesn’t explain where sin comes from, but illustrates what it looks like to presume a lack of OS.
COULSON: Rogers and I did a tape for Bell and Howell summarizing that project; and I talked about some of the short-term effects and said that when people do what they deeply want to do, it isn’t immoral. Well, we hadn’t waited long enough. The lesbian nuns’ book, for example, hadn’t come out yet; and we hadn’t gotten the reports of seductions in psychotherapy, which became virtually routine in California. We had trained people who didn’t have Rogers’ innate discipline from his own fundamentalist Protestant background, people that thought that being themselves meant unleashing libido.
Maslow did warn us about this, Maslow believed in evil, and we didn’t. He said our problem was our total confusion about evil. (This is quoting from Maslow’s journals, which came out too late to stop us. His journals came out in ‘79, and we had done our damage by then.) Maslow said there was danger in our thinking and acting as if there were no paranoids or psychopaths or SOBs in the world to mess things up.
We created a miniature utopian society, the encounter group. As long as Rogers and those who feared Rogers’ judgement were present it was okay, because nobody fooled around in the presence of Carl Rogers. He kept people in line; he was a moral force. People did, in fact, consult their consciences, and it looked like good things were happening.
Read the whole interview.
