Prager University: Are People Born Good?
Prager University has released its newest video, filed under “Political Science”, that asks: Are People Born Good?
In our universities, newspapers, and television shows, it is a given that external forces are the cause of crime. If not for poverty, murder and rape would be much lower. If not for racism, America’s inner cities would be far wealthier. So on and so on. At the core of this belief is that people are basically good, and it is society that makes them bad. This notion is simply not true.
As Dennis Prager explains in this video, human nature is not basically good. It is not, though, basically bad. People are born more or less neutral. And it is incumbent upon parents, teachers, and yes, society, to turn children into good adults. It doesn’t happen on its own.
Comments
The answer is no. Every man is born dead in sin and at enmity with God. The most innocent baby is a hater of God until he’s circumcised, baptized, given to God.
Prager gets one part of the answer right. He does not seem to understand that the uncircumcised of body or heart (the baptized) cannot teach anybody to be good because they themselves are not good. Only those circumcised as part of the covenant relationship with God and in Christ, can teach the Law and the Gospel whereby we are taught to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Under any other kind of civic instruction lies a vacuum; ask Marcus Aurelius.