1 result for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"essay 3 friday april 16 1982" AND stemmed:man)
[... 56 paragraphs ...]
The belief in sin and in the sinful self has been for uncounted centuries embedded in man’s concepts about himself and God. Around those beliefs civilizations evolved and religions orbited. So I maintain that I am being unfairly attacked (perhaps that is too strong a word) for personally accepting in my own understanding a philosophy to which ten millions and more have also succumbed, and to which the “wisest” of the species have given their loyalty and trust.
Yet even in our [Jane’s] childhood years I yearned to free us from such doctrines, to search for alternate explanations, to go where no man or woman had gone before, and to venture outside the boundaries of all official beliefs.
And to me this was no play but the main challenge—to discover while within one life all life’s meaning; to acquire in one life’s vulnerable swiftness evidence of eternity’s breadth and depth, to sniff out its extended unknown dimensions. So if in the pursuit of such goals I overdid my cautions and overreacted, it certainly was not out of malice, but in a well-meaning attempt to protect the creative self—to keep a hand of caution on its course lest the centuries of man’s belief in sin carried a true weight that I shared but could not comprehend.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
So the belief in man’s sinful nature persisted in my mind, a constant reminder of man’s ignorance of his own nature. How could I be sure that our sight wasn’t also distorted; that our “sin” was in not accepting sin as a value? Perhaps sin itself contained some value that escaped beyond our calculations, still undiscovered.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]