This is where you and I differ. I think the primary origin for egotism is a lack of love, a lack of acceptance, an influx of pain, of loneliness, of misery. We are proud and egotistic, not because we don’t want to love, but because we **can’t **love, because we don’t even know what love is. We do all sorts of horrible things, not out of self-love, but out of self-hate, and wish to project that hate outside onto others because otherwise it would destroy ourselves. It is precisely because we don’t have the greatest ontological good (love) that we settle for lesser goods (power and such). In a world with so much alleviated pain, the world would be a better place. It truly would be a paradise, compared to what we have here.
That is my sentiment. I may be wrong or right, who knows? This vision feels more right to me than your vision.
We don’t actually differ in the respects you are claiming. Your point is that we “can’t” love to the degree necessary to overcome self-hate, so we are not free to the extent that we can’t love. That was precisely my point about freedom being a capacity made possible by the love of God. We cannot, on our own, be free to love as we need to, we require the (name removed by moderator)ut of exactly that power from outside of ourselves, from God, not from the external world - that is precisely what the doctrine of grace is about. Grace is the power to love which transforms us and makes us capable of loving in such a way as to overcome self-hate and the tendency to take that hate out on others around us.
Grace is the ability to “put up” with the evil of others so it does not disable us. This is why Jesus emphasized turning the other cheek, to demonstrate that evil need not be overwhelming of the love, the grace of God, within us.
Instead of changing the external effects of evil, as your model proposes, Christianity gives the power to change each of us internally to accomplish the overcoming of the self-hate that leads to despicable acts. It is precisely your model inverted - from the inside out rather than changing the externals and leaving it to chance whether the internal state of each individual will then “come around.” The point of Christianity is that the external state will necessarily be transformed once the internal state of each individual is, but the internal state of each person will not necessarily be perfected just because the external world is ideal.
If we were all Mother Teresas only natural “evil” would remain, but if we each had sufficient material goods and the extent of the possible harm of our actions reduced, that would not necessarily turn us into moral creatures. The fact that the internal state is left unchanged could very well lead to dissatisfaction with this new external world and new kinds of abuses would arise.
The greediest individuals in the world are often those with the most goods whose level of dissatisfaction grows with each new acquisition. If your theory were true, human beings would be more moral once a basic level of needs were satisfied, but this clearly is not true in the world we find ourselves in. Jewish and Christian thought has always held that there is a deficit inside each of us that the world, even a perfect one, cannot fix. Paradise was perfect but that did not prevent the fall. The answer to the problem of evil is internal conversion to God, the moral and spirtual perfection of free agents. Scaffolding the external world to the demands of imperfect beings will simply cause the degeneration of that world. Paradise lost, again.
