On embracing sin

Alexander Pope said that first we abhor sin, then we tolerate it, finally we embrace it. He is talking about how people are influenced by the tainted world around them. I find this to be true for my own walk in life, but it doesn't bother me. I think Pope had the wrong angle on the situation. As a young man, I tended to see the world in black and white. Something was either according to the moral law I had grown up knowing from teenage years or it wasn't. But, I matured and watched carefully how older people in the world behaved. Matters weren't just black or white. Next, I figured that the world was a big place, so I could walk to the beat of my own moral law and not have to hold anyone else responsible for it—just me. Then, I matured and noticed how situations were never according to any moral law. Good situations were nearly always tainted by evil and evil situations nearly always had some noble element about them.

That being true, I realized that striving for some fictitious moral code that no one ever observed was ludicrous. I might as well let life play out. Where I could be the good part of an evil situation, I would be. Where I could act on behalf of good even though a situation was mostly bad, I did. I know to someone looking in it might seem that once upon a time in my youth I abhorred evil and that as I matured I began to tolerate evil, only to finally embrace it. I would rather think as an insider that I finally understood the human condition and the other-worldly principle that a little leaven, leavens the whole lump. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.