“Original Sin is the radically unpopular doctrine. Yet it is very similar to one of the most popular doctrines of Freud, one of Christianity’s most powerful enemies: namely, the doctrine of the ‘pleasure principle’. Both teach essentially the same thing: that we are all born into the world as selfish little pigs; that (as Augustine puts it), ‘the innocence of babies is in the helplessness of their bodies, not in the virtue in their souls’; that our original working philosophy is always ‘I want what I want when I want it’; and that even when we later learn to cover up and compromise this demand, it remains down at the bottom of our heart.
“The difference between Freud and Christ is not about this fact but about whether it is to be judged and whether it can be cured. For the secularist, it is just human nature, and all we can do is live with it, compromise, ‘cope’. For Christianity, it is our disease, not our design, and it must and can be destroyed. In other words, Christianity, with its dogma of Original Sin, is wildly more optimistic.
“Secular morality is a plan for the fulfillment of selfishness. Christianity is a plan for its destruction..
“Even our systems of social justice are rooted in our Original Sin, the injustice in our nature. We can build well-designed buildings, but only out of broken bricks. The problem is not in our systems but in our selves. This is the reason all societies collapse, why the dams of goodness never hold out long against the floods of evil, why the bad people always somehow seem to come to the top. Society is only us. There is no ‘them’.”
Peter Kreeft, in Christianity for Modern Pagans…