The truth about the crooked timbers of humanity is too painful

Reading the papers, with their unremitting tales of human depravity and cruelty, I sometimes feel that the human race is a failed experiment which ought to be brought to an end as expeditiously as possible. We learn from the Book of Genesis that God had the same idea. He ‘saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repenteth the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.’

Philosophers have often reached similarly gloomy conclusions. Immanuel Kant, a righteous person in his thunderously inarticulate way, thought man was radically evil and observed, ‘Out of the crooked timbers of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.’ This radical fault, which goes to the fundamentals of man’s being and has been present since his earliest origins, is called Original Sin.