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Are We Fundamentally Good, or Fundamentally Evil?


          The wicked are estranged from the womb; These who speak lies go astray from birth. (Psalm 58:3)

          Someone asked a question online: “In light of how we are behaving given COVID-19,    are we as humans fundamentally good or are we fundamentally bad?” It set me thinking about a book I read years ago, The Great Influenza. It gave a detailed description of how a virus works and changed my thinking on the subject of evil.
Let’s suppose that in your essential trip to the grocery store, somehow one particle of the COVID-19 virus makes it way into your body. Just one. I don’t know the precise multiplication rate of any virus, but let’s suppose that in the first 12 hours, that one becomes a million, but you have no symptoms. By the end of the first day, your spouse has 50 viral particles, your oldest child 40,000, and your youngest child 1, but no one has any symptoms.[1]
         After ten days, you have a cough. Your spouse has a mild fever. Your oldest child seems fine, but your youngest has to go to the hospital for a fever and shortness of breath.
         Now, here’s the question. At what point did you, or your family members become sick? Was it when the first viral particle entered your bodies? When the virus reprogrammed your body to produce more viral particles? When the viral load reached a certain point but you were still without symptoms? When your symptoms first developed? When?
          Following the same logic, when does a person become sin-sick (AKA evil)? Is it passed on through the parent’s genetics so that the child is already sick when he’s born? Is it with her first cry? His first lie, or the first time she steals a piece of gum from her sister? Or, do we not “catch” evil until we do something more malicious, like key someone’s car or drunkenly rape someone who is drunker still? Or, does it take “selling our soul to the devil” and setting ourselves up to be the master villain from an espionage thriller, who can’t wait for the opportunity to explain just how his brilliant plot is going to put the world under his control?
          I believe we “catch” evil in the womb, from the day of conception, that it is a spiritual virus that passes from parents to child in the DNA. Some folks may be like the oldest child in your hypothetical family. Everyone else is sick, but he/she seems fine. Some are like the youngest child, needing to be hospitalized (or imprisoned) because of the damage it’s done. Most of us have mild symptoms. A lie here, a word of gossip there, a little hatred mixed with our love in another situation.
Evil may be recognized by its symptoms and their severity, just as COVID-19 is recognized in its symptoms and severity, but the lack of symptoms does not mean the lack of illness.
          One of the good things about most viruses is that if one survives it, one’s body stores a playbook by which it can combat the illness the next time it enters your system. The immunity may be enough that you never have symptoms again, or it may result in a milder case of the illness. Sometimes, weakened versions of the virus can be introduced to the system (vaccination) so that we develop the antibodies. Sometimes, this isn’t possible. This seems to be the case with evil. Introducing mild evil to our lives doesn’t prevent evil.
          Another means of gaining immunity is through a transfusion provided by someone with the immunity. For this to happen, the person providing the transfusion must have been exposed to the ailment but survived. Our bodies can then reproduce the immunity factor – not always completely or perfectly, but at least partly. This is what Jesus did on the cross. He gave His blood, so that we might gain immunity from sin.
           What all this means is that the answer to the question online is that our being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad has nothing to do with our behavior, whether good or bad. It has to do with a disease in our souls which may or may not produce symptoms we identify as evil. When do you get sick? When do you become evil?



[1] By the way, on average, each person with COVID-19 passes it on to 2.5 people. People with Ebola pass it on to 2 people. People with HIV/AIDS pass it on to about 3.5 people. People with measles pass it to 11-18 people.


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