How did we come to be so bad?  Some folks don’t seem to be so bad, some are more consistently bad, and still others appear to be ”rotten to the core.”  As the saying goes, “Nobody’s perfect.”  Why is that?  Is badness contagious?   Does the Devil always make us do it?  Or do all of us have varying quantities of bad genes?

In the religious circles we’re taught that we can’t help being bad, that we’re born that way.  Ironically, they also teach us that our badness destines us for destruction — even though it wasn’t our fault.  We were born that way, right? Add in the concept of eternal torment, and something seems terribly wrong.  All of this is based upon the assumption that nobody was born perfect.

Well, a couple of folks were.  Adam and Eve were born perfect.  Born, created, whatever.  Still they were perfect.  They even had rules, but were still perfect.  Enter the negative influence:  a wild animal, serpent creature (Genesis 3) whom the clergy will later call Satan.  He saw Eve as a clear target, and he counted on the fact that she would have a similar negative influence on her husband.

As the story goes, the two thus became sinful (rule breakers).  It became a permanent part of their being (biological or spiritual trait, I’m not sure), such that it would be passed down to every one of their children.  So we can be good on our own sometimes, but we can never be perfect.  We’re taught to repent (turn from bad to good) but nothing can redeem us except the blood of Jesus Christ, provided that we believe that he died for us and we accept him as our personal savior.

You see, somewhere along the line they threw in a Jewish tradition of sacrificing animals to entice God to forgive their sins.  They did it religiously, but it just wasn’t good enough.  God had to send his son (or himself, depending on where you are on the trinity) to be that ultimate, one-time sacrifice.  Not just for the Jews, though — now we get to include everybody.

Do we still break the rules after this life-changing experience?  You betcha.  Not only do we still break rules, but we develop a keen sense of observing how other Christians are breaking worse rules than us, or aren’t as holy as us.  So long as we’re praying, reading our Bibles and witnessing (and going to church, of course), we’re still part of the body of Christ, and our continued “unintentional” sins will be covered by that blood.  What’s up with that?

Which brings me back to the positive/negative influences.  The entire sum of our God-given experience centers on our relationship with others, and the progression thereof, what I like to call the journey.  Jesus taught little-to-nothing about the doctrines summarized in the previous paragraphs.  He did, however, have plenty to say about how we should live.  Stop being bad.  Start being good.  End of story.

And yes, it cost him his life to give us three years of hardcore teaching on the subject.  His Father could have kept him from being killed, but he didn’t.  The final proof of his love and sonship was his resurrection from the dead.

While it’s true that we’re not likely to prove perfection within a controlled environment, using perfect parents, it’s more reasonable to believe that God would achieve ultimate perfection by perfecting those who have been soiled along the way.

Love is the nucleus of the atom we call life.  God is at the center of that love.  The outer circles burn with his discipline, the process that purifies and refines us from the ugliness that has attached to us on our journey.  Sometimes we can actually see that process in people.  Sometimes not.  That’s what the journey is for.  Death just kicks it up a notch.