For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those
who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that
it belongs to your neighbors--between those who preached that the
good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those
who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incomp-
etents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you
and that the good is to live it.

	 Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your
self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are
opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, that there
is no right or wrong in reason--that in reason there's no reason to
be moral.

	 Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that
all your moralists have stood united. It was man's mind that all their
schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy.

	 My point is that your morality begins by damming man as evil,
then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible
for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that
he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start,
not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is
himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good
is that which he is not.

	 The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

	 A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent
contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of
choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth,
he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be
neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a
fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's
nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime
he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him
guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.
To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single
concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet **THAT** is the
root of your morality: Christianity.