With the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and prose fiction today, and more patently among serious writers than in the underworld of letters, tend to become less and less real… If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness, and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of the elite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous. (Quoted in Russell Kirk’s Eliot and His Age).
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Excellent! Sin gives people an actual struggle, opposed to, yes, more vaporous matters.
Vaporous men are those men hallowed out with no focus inward toward their soul or upward to the transcendent…I have recently seen headlines on magazines in the grocery store discussing young actors and models who are addicted to plastic surgery; just today I read the headlines of teenage mom's who are addicted to plastic surgery…it is not just men who are lost in super-size state universities stuck in adolescence but also young women who are turn toward theier exterior beauty to sustain the looks of a seventeen year old for the rest of their lives. I was truly saddened by the death of Elizabeth Taylor, I remember seeing images and movies with her natural beauty as a teenager and early adulthood…yet she was the precursor of today's youth afraid of death and perpetually living under the knife for the beauty of youth.
Perhaps ignoring Original Sin is the first step to people thinking that they are just fine as they are, and that better morals, manners or minds are not worth cultivating.