The fundamental tenet and experience of Christianity is that people are all subject to original sin and therefore have to be released from that and the event is accomplished by God sending down His Son Jesus to suffer and therefore atone for all the sins of mankind. St. Paul, who developed that doctrine, may have done so as to explain how it was that a Messiah could have died when in Jewish tradition a Messiah had to live. So Peter found an excuse for Jesus to die: He was destined to redeem mankind from sin. But Jesus is logically secondary to the primary sense that mankind needs redemption from its failings, Christianity having an exquisite sense of misery, that people are unworthy and polluted. Jesus, in a way, is a deus ex machina: He is the one to rescue the settlers from the Indians, and He does that work whether He was a real Son of God, the incarnation of the Deity, as Paul thought, or if He is a symbolic and historical figure who shows the path to enlightenment so that people are no longer overwhelmed by their guilt and shame. Christianity prizes itself on making their people feel very deeply their blame before they are freed from it.
Moreover, it is not difficult to feel an inkling of what original sin means. Adam’s sin is a symbol of an abiding human character rather than an historical event for in that case the sins of the fathers are inherited by the children and that isn’t right. Rather, the story of Adam is a metaphor for what is everywhere present in human nature. Everyone is tempted to or actually does something underhanded or mean spirited to take advantage or just for the hell of it. You flatter a member of the opposite sex just to get sex. You play on the shortcomings of others so as to beat a weak tennis opponent or take notes from another so as to shine in a conference. You eat the last bottle of beer or don’t replace the toilet paper even though it has run out because someone else in the household will. You betray confidence just because you have come into the facts and show off your knowledge. You send your best friend into battle so as to take his warrior’s wife. And so on and so on, life full of vanities and petty as well as significant ill gotten gains, people demeaning themselves so as to get, as St. Augustine said, some pears you may have not that much really wanted. So why do people do this? Why do people have these traits where they become underhanded or devious or selfish? The reason isn’t the sociological one that the activity is reasonable-- a white lie a person will make so as to get a chance at a job when they are not fully qualified, or putting on a pretense so as to please someone who is being courted. That is natural in the sense that such activities make sense in the circumstances, beyond law and morality but just self-interest. Instead, these choices come out of a universal trait to intend to do badly, a lapse into one’s nature rather than just the fact that not all of social life is well ordered and naturally cooperative
That focus on personal shortcomings may be an overly simplistic psychology but it ties into what is a very deep psychology whereby people look at their own weaknesses, their own failings, rather than their strengths, and see those as their essential natures, and told for thousands of years to blame themselves for their shortcomings rather than to prize whatever they have to as personal rectitude or accomplishments. Ego shame overreaches ego strength and only some outside force can overcome it. Christianity turns the corner and finding Jesus gives us, makes up for, our own ego failings and can, indeed, liberate people from lives overcome with superstitions and fears so as to make the world a better place, whether to make art or science or the industrial revolution. So, at least according to Weber, guilt is liberated into productivity by acknowledging one’s own pathetic nature to cling to what is wrong and malevolent.
Now try a radical approach, If there is an original sin in that we can appreciate everyone’s temptation to do what is bad or malevolent, the internal feeling far worse than the infraction itself because it is in our bones, in our nature, rather than merely a failure to accord with laws, which are useful rather than just reminders of eternal maliciousness, think that there might be a parallel impulse which we can think of as original good, which means that within every person there is a tendency to do the right thing, to have an impulse to goodness out of one’s soul rather than just to be benign in that a person merely follows orders on high to do what is right and proper. We all have that inkling. We give water to a little bird or to a dying man even when there is risk at doing so because the bad guys are in pursuit, or to shield children from a mass murderer, people putting something beyond self interest because of some fellow feeling with other creatures. Yes, there are limits in that one is restrained by rational considerations such as risks to life or liberty or available wealth, but people can be generous as to feelings as well as wealth as when you offer your last apple to a friend or acquaintance who has spent a day on a hot trek. People also take pride in the successes of others and find charming or attractive other people they have met. We respect people for their own qualities even if they are not your own and so not a matter of reflected egotism. Indeed, St. Paul, who originated original sin, speaks of charity as the highest of ideals and suggests that a world dominated by the banner of Jesus would fill the world with the charity to which usual life has a mere inkling. And it would be a mistake for Christians to think that most people would not heed to their original instincts to be decent people rather than to follow those feelings of the malevolent sort, the original evils, that are supposed to dominate life before Jesus arose. Otherwise there could be little community or fortitude or fidelity if people could not see beyond their selfish noses so as to partake of fellow feeling and a pride of being merely decent. Those feelings predated Jesus; they are part of civilizations from millenia past. They had already developed ego strength just as egoism also had developed the basis for the inevitable short sightedness of malevolence.
So generosity is as real as malice and probably more prevalent in the social world so as to allow it to continue. That certainly is the view of David Hume who treats morality as the outgrowth of a natural taste for human sympathy towards others, more important than the restrictions and covenants that are made to bind people to the law or shame them into acting properly. The problem for Christian religion, of course, is that thinking of this natural penchant to be good no longer requires a son of God to rescue people from their failings, people self correcting themselves so as tobe what is more satisfying, which is to be in accord with their better selves. Even people who think of themselves as harsh or dismissive turn to their loved ones to remind them that they are not really that bad, that they mean well even if they speak harshly, or that they mean well. What is startling about Scrooge is that Dickens imagines a malevolent figure when all figures can be transformed into Tom Crachit, blessing themselves and their fellow man. Dickens is sentimental because being good is natural and evil is perverted, while the more doleful Shakespeare thought that some people and many people in their bones were spiritually twisted either permanently as in Richard III or temporarily and tragically with Hamlet or even Macbeth who was drawn into blood without him having originally been that way.
It is hard to believe that the world pulled off what Weber claimed was its grand irony: that a religion dedicated to personal abnegation and self loathing would through Protestantism become a people self assertive, rational and productive because the members saw themselves as elect and therefore free of the burdens of shame and remorse, fixated on the living God who could liberate them only spiritually and, by the bye, materially, from their emotional and hence social chains. Rather, there is an iteration of advances, some in social comity, as in the invention of tolerance to end the religious wars, the development of governmental institutions whereby parliamentary democracy evolved and, perhaps most important, the development of reason, in theology and then in science, which all traces back to Plato and Aristotle as the Founding Fathers of the West.
Now, let us try something even more radical than to premise the idea that there is original good to compensate for or to parallel original sin. Let us, as the expression goes, go beyond good and evil. Why should we impose on people the idea that their evil or their goodness are tests whereby how you act in each of our relatively short lifespans determine or consign us either to eternal damnation or bliss? That seems a very long sentence even for the worst of the infractions. More importantly, why is morality the only basis on which to judge people? Great generals, like David, cited before, can do a very bad thing, and yet he was favored by God. The same is true of the rest of us. We are painters or great lovers or merely diligent in our work even if we are also people, in their other aspects of lives, are butchers when they are generals or unfaithful as lovers or negligent of their responsibilities.As the saying goes, maybe Stalin loved his dog. That doesn’t make up for his cruelties, only an admission that people are complicated and they might not be sorted out only on their moral lapses. And, after all, morality is a late addition to religion, the association of the two perhaps invented by Abraham, who weighed how many good people should be compared to a community for the community to be saved from destruction. Previously, religion was about animating the forces of nature. The weather changes because a person like figure decides to do so, the idea of change not yet abstracted from human decision, forces something on their own. People still can cling to the awesomeness of God or the universe even if the petty concerns of people to be worthy of approval as moral, which is supposedly under their own control, rather than this conceit of good and evil as primary to be eliminated as just a reflection of the egotism whereby religion is all about us and our own particular concerns and emotions.
Let me try to be precise. There is a very long list of attributes that characterize human life, each of which can be treated as a social role in that a tall person is turned from an adjective to a noun whereby a tall, an awkward phrase except to a tailor or salesman, has certain consequences, such as difficulty in fitting into seats at the ballgame so as not to interrupt the line of sight for the person behind him. People are also bland or aggressive or pudgy or musically talented and it is coincidental whether they are therefore bad or good in that sometimes it is good to be aggressive as when defending a child or bad when overbearing a spouse. Only idealists such as Plato would argue that each characteristic is just a species of an ideal type so that pudgy is always bad because it is far from the shape of what a person should be and so also there is the idea of a medium, so Aristotle would say, whereby there are people who are just right aggressive, neither too much or too little of that. Most qualities are therefore moral neutral. But there are some characteristics or traits which are separated from the rest as ones which have intrinsic moral weight. People are brave or magnanimous or double dealing or vicious. Whether being like that is one’s inherent and general nature is neither here nor there. The point is that they are a different class of characteristics, what we might call secondary characteristics, not because the feelings or impulses of those are more trivial or superficial than the others, but because they have an additional evaluation than the ones that proceed from knowing people to be wary of those who are angry or trusting of those who are amiable. These secondary characteristics are regarded with the additional class of being moral and immoral, that label added on to those descriptions of what people are. And in addition to there being a separate class of moral characteristics to be distinguished from neutral ones, moral characteristics are themselves neutered from morality by attending to their circumstances, as when being cold blooded in considering war is a virtue in a democracy but dreadful in a demagogue, and a tall person becomes moral rather than neutral when a tall sheriff, like Gary Cooper, is interpreted as laconic. or George Washington gains stature because, in part, he is tall.
Now consider that in life much of life does not depend on what we might call the moral vices and virtues but rather on being practical minded about the other traits people may have. Again, that example of angry people not being bad but knowing to give them a wide berth when they get rankled, which is what people generally do, just as they like spending time with the amiable even if they may not have ‘deeper’ emotional connections, such as friendship or love.And, in fact, life goes on in its merry way just accommodating traits rather than dealing with the godlike sternness of insisting that something is right or wrong and such a world without morality is very liberating because people are not under the law whether in fact because personal accommodation is older and more general that the strictures of the law but also because it is no longer necessary to create a state or a community to create a compulsive law so as to make people right. They just do so naturally, or more exactly, just because of the ins and outs of social association.
Now tie all this into the more usual construction of moral relativism. That is usually understood as referring to the fact that different communities or nations have different beliefs and values that may perhaps arise out of their differing circumstances, but once established are difficult to give up because the beliefs and values are the axiomatic principles of moral thought. You sacrifice your life so that a child will survive from an attack by a mass murderer. It seems obvious and self evident, but you could also cringe at the thought that one might think otherwise, But I have seen people willing to risk a spouse to the gun of a German soldier because it was more likely that the male partner was more likely to overcome the soldier and the wife might only be wounded. So it is not all that obvious what the right thing to do is, however many people are wedded in their emotions to their principles even if it leads to death or dishonor. The circumstances on which the principles are to be applied leads to a different definition of moral relativism, which is that the moral choice is reduced to its circumstances and so there is nothing moral to be said about the matter, only what is pragmatically realistic in acquiring or tending towards a more fruitful resolution. If, in an instant, a man calculates that risking his spouse gives a marginally better chance to overcome the German soldier, then it makes sense to try it. Morality is not an issue, only practicality. Morality is beside the point, an intrusion, as are those whole categories of characterizations seen as moral, onto practice, or what we might call by its proper name, “Pragmatism”, which is a philosophy that has no need for morality per se.