Parasite

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

5. Parasite
Bernard Shaw: “You cannot have the power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
During the civil rights movement, some blacks figured out ways to defraud their own movement.

Ironies and Hybrids
Saints bring dirty weapons to holy wars.
Reform needs constant reform; rescuers need to be rescued.
Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it.
Human beings are extremely complex creatures where great good and great evil often cohabit, sometimes in separate, well-insulated compartments, but sometimes in an intimacy so deep and twisted that we never get to see the one moral quality without the other.
Until the Enlightenment, sinful human pride was widely regarded as the first of the seven deadly sins. Now it is no longer viewed with alarm.
Theology has become therapy, holiness is replaced by happiness, truth by feeling, ethics by self-esteem.
The main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace.
Hubris is a hybrid that can be either titanic or pathetic and it can afflict the great and the would-be great.
Often humility has been used as a club to beat other races, women, children, etc. into submission.
The proud love humility in others.
The humbled sometimes reply by usurping the very pride they had hated.

Privation and Parasite
Even when sin is depressingly familiar, it is never normal; it is unknown, irrational, alien; it is a departure from the norm.
Sin is deviant and perverse, an in-justice, in-iquity, in-gratitude, dis-order, dis-obedience, faith-lessness, law-lessness, god-lessness.
Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the missing of a mark.
Sin is an intruder, a gate-crasher, that has gotten into God’s world uninvited.
Sin is a parasite; nothing about sin is its own: all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods.
Sin is a spoiler of entities—there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
C.S. Lewis: “Goodness, so to speak, is itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.’
Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive.
Evil wants good; it needs good to be evil. It merely wants the good without God.
Sin is fruitful because, like a virus, it attaches to the life force and dynamics of its host. It attaches and converts them to a new use.
We are often drawn to men who commit bold evil, not because we love the evil but because we love the boldness and audacity and freedom. Sin is only attractive when it is vital. But these very qualities are borrowed and not original, because the very boldness, imagination, and creativity come from the very God it attacks.
Often we focus on the “good” aspects of evil while choosing not to notice the negative fallout it creates. We only see the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life.