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Original Sin
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*The idea of Original Sin
simply damns man for the fact of possessing free will. Apparently he was
perfect before the fall, because he was a moral robot, and became evil by
acquiring the faculty of moral choice. That depraved notion is simply the
condemnation of free will as an evil.
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Isabel Paterson (author of The God of the
Machine, and a friend), May 8, 1948
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 5, "Letters to Isabel Paterson"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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*The name
of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and
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 code.
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-John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Part Three : A is A, Chapter VII, "'This is John Galt Speaking'"
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