Undoubtedly modern philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis have firmly contested the idea of human sin, guilt, or responsibility in an effort to “liberate” us. A strange thing has happened, then, for we have ended up by being convicted that sin (especially original sin) no longer counts, that there is no responsibility, that we can do as we like with no limits, and the result is not conduct that is open to the good or liberated for it, but frantic egoism, scorn for others, a desire for aggrandizement and domination. Once we begin to attain to the conviction that we are not sinners, what do we see around us? What is brought to us by the thousands of pictures transmitted by television? Epidemics, famines, massacres, genocides, revolutions, everywhere leading to innumerable executions even when the intentions are the best, the installation of bloody and capricious dictatorships, socialism transformed into an instrument of oppression, of murder, and of hatred, the spoliation of the planet by technology. Pictures of hell are set before our eyes every day.
Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (p. 144)
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