If not, I may watch the ecclesiastical series on evil.
Nicer clothes.
Monday morning.
Well, it was Bill and the Professor. Original Sin in Paul, then theodicy in Irenaeus and Augustine.
Turns out that Reinhold Niebuhr agrees with me that Original Sin is the only Christian doctrine that requires no faith to believe in, only observation. He also noted that "Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it."
Niebuhr's concept of irony referred to situations in which "the consequences of an act are diametrically opposed to the original intention,"
Niebuhr's great foe was idealism. American idealism, he believed, comes in two forms: the idealism of the antiwar noninterventionists, who are embarrassed by power, and the idealism of pro-war imperialists, who disguise power as virtue. He said the non-interventionists, without mentioning Harry Emerson Fosdick by name, seek to preserve the purity of their souls, either by denouncing military actions or by demanding that every action taken be unequivocally virtuous. They exaggerate the sins committed by their own country, excuse the malevolence of its enemies, and, as later polemicists have put it, inevitably blame America first. This is all just a pious way of refusing to face real problems, Niebuhr argued.
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