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We have been taught by some religious teachers that our essential nature is depraved, foul and corrupt

• Many faithful Christians have been told a story in which their essential nature is foul and corrupt. Doug Hammack
• In current usage it is a synonym for “culpability” or “crime.” Today, the word “sin” means the evil we do, say, or think. When we add the adjective “original” in front of the idea of criminal deeds, we come to think of the doctrine like this: “I’m very, very bad. I know so, because of all the bad things I do. I do them even when I try not to. It must be that my very nature is bad, and thus, I am bad. Doug Hammack
• An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines. Toni Morrison
• The Christian doctrine of original sin and its harsher cousin, total depravity, have had a lot to do with our selective way of seeing our own natures. Doug Hammack

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We are told we are most essentially defined by our sinful nature…

• There is the seed of all sins–of the vilest and worst of sins–in the best of men. Thomas Brooks
• Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are. Karl Barth
• Men are born to sin… Sharon Kay Penman
• He’d grown up with a heavy dose of sin consciousness. In his religion, God was displeased with people, always mildly angry at them for being so consistently sinful. In his story, human beings are “totally depraved,” “originally sinful,” and hopelessly infected by the death nature of sin. Consequently, God, the embodiment of holiness, could not abide to be in the presence of sinful creatures such as ourselves. Doug Hammack
• I need forgiveness for my sins, but I need also deliverance from the power of sin… I appreciate the blessed fact of God’s forgiveness, but I want something more than that: I want deliverance. I need forgiveness for what I have done, but I need also deliverance from what I am. Watchman Nee
• Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state. William Law
• Only when we understand the holiness of God will we understand the depth of our sin. Billy Graham
• The seed of sin is in us when we are born. Billy Graham
• Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking. Aldous Huxley
• If God wiped out all sources of evil in the world we would no longer be here, the evil is inside us. Timothy Keller
• Humanity is the sin of God. Theodore Parker
• If Jupiter hurled his thunderbolt as often as men sinned, he would soon be out of thunderbolts. Ovid
• The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a person trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin’. Mary Daly
• Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity. Xunzi

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…defined by a state of original sin

• Original sin: The tendency to evil supposedly innate in all human beings, held to be inherited from Adam in consequence of the Fall. The concept of original sin was established by the writings of St Augustine. Oxford Dictionary
• The first chapters of the Bible tell us of the sin of man. The guilt of that sin had rested upon every single one of us. John Gresham Machen
• The only sin is the sin of being born. Samuel Beckett
• Do you not know that you are Eve? The judgment of God upon this sex lives on in this age; therefore, necessarily the guilt should live on also. You are the gateway of the devil; you are the one who unseals the curse of that tree, and you are the first one to turn your back on the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the devil was not capable of corrupting; you easily destroyed the image of God, Adam. Because of what you deserve, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die. Tertullian
• Because of the sin of the first generation of people on the planet, every subsequent man, woman, and child inherits a badness-gene that ensures they will sin, too. So everybody has to pay. Nobody escapes. Everybody who doesn’t figure out how to pay the debt that can’t be paid must be punished. Doug Hammack
• Original sin, therefore, appears to be a hereditary, depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls ‘works of. John Calvin
• We are saved from nothing if we are not saved from sin. Little sins are pioneers of hell. The backslider begins with what he foolishly considers trifling with little sins. There are no little sins. There was a time when all the evil that has existed in the world was comprehended in one sinful thought of our first parent; and all the now evil is the numerous and horrid progeny of one little sin. James Howell
• In Adam’s fall– We sinned all. Thomas Moore
• Men are born to sin… Sharon Kay Penman
• Original sin is the only rational solution of the undeniable fact of the deep, universal and early manifested sinfulness of men in all ages, of every class, and in every part of the world. Charles Hodge
• By his disobedience of God’s law, before man had exercised his power to bring children into the earth, not only Adam lost everything for himself, but his children were born as sinners, imperfect, and without the right to live. Joseph Franklin Rutherford

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We are told we are inherently wicked, vile and even evil…

• If our religion tells us horrible things about our basic nature for enough generations, it tends to give us a collective sense of self-hatred and blinds us to the glorious divinity within. Doug Hammack
• He who thinks he lives without sin puts aside not sin, but pardon. Saint Augustine
• But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea. William Langland
• God is the only being who is good. Francis Chan
• When you and I realize that we are morally evil, dead in sin and deserving of God’s wrath with no way out on our own, we begin to discover our desperation for Christ.  David Platt

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…permanently stained by sin…

• Besides the guilt of sin and the power of sin, there is the stain of sin. Nathaniel Culverwell
• Most people think that there is a monarchy, where God is the king and we are the subjects, and the subjects are inferior to this invisible king. But not only are we inferior, we are also stained by sin, and therefore, untrustworthy. Wayne Dyer

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…and unworthy of love…

• Our love for God and our appreciation of His love and forgiveness will be in proportion to the recognition of our sin and unworthiness. Dave Hunt
• When we grasp that we are unworthy sinners saved by an infinitely costly grace, it destroys both our self-righteousness and our need to ridicule others. Timothy Keller
• You see what a poor sinner I am, and how unworthy to possess what was given me; for that reason it has been taken away. Robert E. Lee
• In the maxims of the law, God is seen as the rewarder of perfect righteousness and the avenger of sin. But in Christ, His face shines out, full of grace and gentleness to poor, unworthy sinners. John Calvin
• God exposes your sin…And you see yourself as small as you are in the presence of a holy God. Johnny Hunt
• The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. C. S. Lewis

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…except for God’s ultimate sacrifice

• Richard Rohr tells of a bumper sticker his New Mexico community created. It said, “God does not love you because you are good. You are good because God loves you.” They sat on that idea for a while, but later decided to update it. “God does not love you because you are good. God loves you because God is good.” Doug Hammack
• At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgment we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God’s holy love was ‘satisfied.’ John Stott

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In many ways, shame is encouraged and glorified and seen as spiritual

• God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. H. Auden
• Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God. Samuel Johnson
• I had a lot of guilt and shame when I was running from God, but nothing like when I was running for God. I was always looking for God’s approval, and that’s where the guilt and shame came out in a big way. Jud Wilhite
• The only shame is to have none. Blaise Pascal
• God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong. Terry Eagleton
• The Church’s teaching was the reason that I lived in so much shame and isolation and pain for all those years. But rather than abandon it and say it’s broken, I want to be part of the change. Vicky Beeching
• Thank God I can suffer ! Thank God I can be made the object of shame and contempt, for in this way God shall be glorified. Charles Spurgeon
• You know, we’ll hardly get our feet out of time [and] into eternity that we’ll bow our heads in shame and humiliation. We’ll gaze on eternity and say, ‘My God! Look at all the riches there were in Jesus Christ, and I’ve come to the Judgment Seat almost a pauper! Aiden Wilson Tozer
• If you are not willing to take the shame on yourself, you then let it remain on Jesus Christ. You must bear the reproach of your sinful state of indifference, or the cause of our Master must bear it. Mordecai Ham
• Suffering leads to glory; shame leads to honor; weakness leads to power. This is God’s way of doing things. Warren W. Wiersbe

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This sense of unworthiness can be very damaging

• Believing that you are unworthy of love and belonging or that who you are authentically is a sin or is wrong, is deadly. Laverne Cox
• Sin is psychological self-abuse. … the most serious sin is one that causes me to say, ‘I am unworthy. I may have no claim to divine sonship if you examine me at my worst.’ For once a person believes he is an ‘unworthy sinner,’ it is doubtful if he can really honestly accept the saving grace God offers. Robert H. Schuller

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Guilt is also encouraged and seen as spiritual

• Jesus Christ does not save the worthy, but the unworthy. Your plea must not be righteousness but guilt. Charles Spurgeon
• Guilt-domination results in a preoccupation with “sin,” an unforgiving emotional attitude frequently exploited by religious demagogues, who use it for coercion and control. Such “sin-and-salvation” merchants, obsessed with punishment, are likely either acting out their own guilt, or projecting it onto others. David R. Hawkins
• Guilt takes the form of penance, self-hatred, psychological and physical self-punishment, suicide, self-abnegation, and self-propagating addiction. “Oh look, God, how I suffer” becomes a subtle attempt to manipulate God. David R. Hawkins
• Guilt: punishing yourself before God doesn’t. Alan Cohen
• God hath yoked to guilt her pale tormentor,–misery. William C. Bryant
• How tired God must be of guilt and loneliness, for that is all we ever bring to Him. Mignon McLaughlin
• I’ve always hated religion. It’s the most guilt-ridden, horrible thing. Linda McCartney
• Father of Light! great God of Heaven! Hear’st thou the accents of despair? Can guilt like man’s be e’er forgiven? Can vice atone for crimes by prayer. Lord Byron
• I’m not denying that depression can be spiritually induced. Guilt from having wronged and hurt others can bring it on. A sense of having failed to live out the will of God can give rise to depression. Certainly the fear of death and what might follow can sap the joy out of life. Tony Campolo
• We can never heartily say “My God!” till we have humbly said “My Guilt!” That is the root of moral reality, of personal religion.  Peter Forsyth
• Christianity cannot erase man’s need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one’s dependence on God. George H. Smith
• Sin cannot dethrone God. That is what sin aims to do, but it misses its mark. Sin brings guilt to a man, but it does not bring him one ounce of sovereignty. God rules even when men imagine they are defying Him. Tom Wells
• As long as we bear the guilt of sin, we cannot protest that God is unjust in allowing us to suffer. C. Sproul
• Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but guilt is simply God’s way of letting you know that you’re having too good a time. Dennis Miller
• Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. Albert Camus
• I realize how depraved it was to instill false guilt in an innocent child’s conscience, causing a distorted image of life, God, and self, leaving little if any feeling of personal worth. Mary Griffith
• All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays. Cathy Ladman
• It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. By believing that we keep the world orderly and understandable…. But [this belief] has a number of serious limitations…. It teaches people to blame themselves. It creates guilt when there is no basis for guilt. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts. Harold S. Kushner
• Much of the impotence of American churches is tied to a profound ignorance and apathy about justification. Our people live in a fog of guilt. Or just as bad, they think being a better person is all God requires. Kevin DeYoung

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Promoting preoccupation with sin and guilt has been a way for religion to control and manipulate us

• For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket – by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. Ayn Rand
• Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned. Terry Pratchett
• Your church, and seeks to control his worshippers through guilt and fear. C. Cast
• Your way of life is sinful and wrong,” he said fiercely. Thus says a man who admits to worshipping a God who vilifies pleasure, relegates women to roles that are little more than servants and broodmares, though they are the backbone of your church, and seeks to control his worshippers through guilt and fear. C. Cast

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As a result of our shame and guilt, we become punitive and harsh to ourselves and others

• Some Christians take a notoriously harsh posture toward themselves. Others mitigate things with ideas about a loving God. Either way, when we believe we are fundamentally evil, our spiritual instincts are to keep our corrupt nature on a tight leash. Our spiritual instincts tend toward the brutal. We no longer beat ourselves with whips as we did in previous generations, but we still beat ourselves up. To keep what we believe is our true nature under control, we impose on ourselves harsh guilt and self-condemnation. We make our failures costly affairs in the belief that by doing so, we’ll be less inclined to repeat them in the future. Ours becomes a self-punishing form of spirituality. By force of punishment, we try to corral our sinful nature, and pummel it into submission. Doug Hammack
• When our approach to ourselves is a punitive one, it isn’t long before we begin to feel and act punitively toward one another. Ours becomes a brittle and dogmatic intolerance of one another’s failures. A sin-centric religion, a sin-centric spirituality, makes our focus the battle with our own sin, but extends to battling one another’s sin. Doug Hammack

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The great tragedy is that by believing we are depraved, we have tended to behave that way

• When we believe the total-depravity version of our story, it has a self-fulfilling effect upon us. Doug Hammack
• If you’re listening to the world, you know our Christian reputation has been terribly sullied. And for good reason. Many of the things we say out loud are awful! People see us as intolerant, judgmental, narrow-minded, self-absorbed, and hypocritical. Those are pretty good synonyms for what we say about ourselves, “totally depraved.” The troubling thing is that the story we tell ourselves has had a causal effect in making us this way. Doug Hammack

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Also, the belief that salvation, when it happens, fundamentally alters our nature creates a sense of separation from the rest of humanity

• When we believe our sin is original and our very essence depraved, our only hope is to be magically changed. We see salvation in Jesus as the way that change happens. Our salvation has to fundamentally alter our nature, making us new creatures. Doug Hammack
• There’s a troubling implication when we tell our story this way. If our fundamental essence must be changed to be with God, then once it happens, once we pray the prayer, or get baptized, or do whatever we do to get “saved,” we become essentially different from, alien to, the rest of humanity. They, having not had this essence-altering spiritual experience, are different from us. This puts us directly at odds with the rest of the human beings on the planet. We are “us,” and they have to be “them.” We’re not, after all, even the same kind of beings. They’re mere humans. We’re “new creatures.” Difference and discord is sown between us at the level of defining essence. Doug Hammack

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As a result of our shame and guilt, we come as beggars to God

• They who truly come to God for mercy, come as beggars, and not as creditors: they come for mere mercy, for sovereign grace, and not for anything that is due. Jonathan Edwards

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We have the Romans to thank for the origination of much of this

• The Roman Empire stopped at Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, allowing Christians in the north and west to shape their faith according to vastly different sensibilities. Celtic Christian instincts are quite different from Roman. It was the instinct of Rome to dominate nature; it was the instinct of the Celts to live in harmony with it. Roman Christians instinctively imposed conformity; Celtic Christians honored diverse ways of experiencing God. Rome focused on a Platonic, sinful view of human nature; Celts focused on divine image breathed into us at creation. Without the same impulse to dominate, control, and conform, the Celts approached indigenous religions from a different angle. They integrated more, vanquished less. Doug Hammack

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The belief in our depravity was then ramped up by some during the reformation…

• During the Reformation, Calvin added in total depravity for emphasis. The essence of human nature, he said, is totally evil, totally corrupt, totally perverse, and totally reprobate. Apart from a metamorphic transformation by God, the Reformers concluded, human nature is intrinsically bereft of any redeeming quality. Gone was any hint of imago Dei. Doug Hammack

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…and the Puritans also took it greatly to heart and spread it too

• There is a hearty Puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787. It is the work of men who believed in original sin, and were resolved to leave open for transgressors no door which they could possibly shut. James Bryce

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The very belief that we are inherently sinful (born in sin), lowers our level of consciousness and hampers our spiritual evolution

• The allegory of ‘Adam and Eve’ calibrates at 70, and the idea that man was ‘born in sin’ calibrates at a level of truth of only 30. Divinity was perceived as oppressive and frightening. An alternate view that stems from consciousness research is that humans emerged as basically innocent but ignorant, which calibrates at 200. In contrast, there is the view of man as expressed by Socrates that all men are intrinsically innocent because they can only choose to do what they perceive as the good, but they are unable to discern the true good from the false illusions of the world. (Socrates’ statement calibrates at 700.) David R. Hawkins

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The great paradox is that the religions that preach our inherently sinful nature also acknowledge that God is within us

• Christian tradition is more than the sin conscious Roman view of human nature. Ours is also the sense of God’s image embedded in our very natures. Ours is also an inheritance of direct encounter with the indwelling Spirit of God, a history of moving beyond certitude to mystery, embracing silence and inner spaciousness. Doug Hammack
• Listen to these paraphrased words from the first pages of the Bible: God created human beings. He created them godlike, reflecting his own nature. God looked over everything he had made . . . And it was good, so very good! Doug Hammack
• We forget that our story goes deeper than sin, telling us we are created by God and of God. We downplay our story’s fundamental truth, that we are alive because the indwelling presence of God has been breathed into us. Doug Hammack
• In our contemplative tradition, God is not a presence that is separate from us but rather the energizing Reality that makes us humanity. God is the presence of love at the heart of creation, and the presence of life at the center of human beings, in the heart of all matter in the universe. Doug Hammack

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The truth is that at the deepest level of our being, there is pure, divine goodness

• … when we touch our truest selves, we touch the Divine. There is wisdom within us, greater than the foolishness in which we so often live. There is a virtue within us, greater than the vice we so often commit. There is kindness within us, greater than the meanness we so often express. But most of all, deep within us there is unbounded love. These attributes exist at the center of every human being because every human being is made in the image of God. This essential ingredient of our nature is a deeper and truer and more real part of us than any lesser nature that infects our souls after the fact. Doug Hammack

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Sin (unconscious behaviour) happens because we have forgotten who we really are…

• In this story, the sin from which we are saved is our forgetfulness. We have forgotten our most precious truth. We have been lured away by falsehood. We are living forced, driven, coerced lives because we forget the way things really are. Doug Hammack
• Salvation then, is about being set free by truth. Missing is any need to be healed of an incurable infection. We are saved when we remember. We are saved when we seek and find God’s Spirit in our very selves. Doug Hammack
• Sin did not erase the divine nature that defines us, but merely caused us to forget it. Sin caused us to become disconnected from our true selves, and to drift from the experience of our essential nature. Consequently, we’re so confused, bewildered, and cast adrift that we’re unable to recall who we truly are, unable live from our true centers. Doug Hammack

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…and as a result, have fallen into a kind of slumber…

• When we live as more base versions of ourselves, we fall into a lower state of existence. Ours have become lives of falseness and ignorance. It is as though we can no longer remember our true beings, our true beginnings, and we are living in a deep sleep, under the sway of a counterfeit nature, a counterfeit identity. Doug Hammack
• Sin is a slumber that has overcome us. Falsehood has caused us to forget the truth. Doug Hammack
• While one is asleep one cannot do anything that is good. Virtue is impossible in unconsciousness, only sin is possible. Unconsciousness is the source of sin. Rajneesh
• Many do not recognize the fact as they ought, that Satan has got men fast asleep in sin and that it is his great device to keep them so. Catherine Booth

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… a state of ignorance as to who we really are

• When we live as more base versions of ourselves, we fall into a lower state of existence. Ours have become lives of falseness and ignorance. It is as though we can no longer remember our true beings, our true beginnings, and we are living in a deep sleep, under the sway of a counterfeit nature, a counterfeit identity. Doug  Hammack
• The Buddha’s view—that the cause of all pain and suffering is ignorance, which is the only “sin” possible, and that one’s duty is to be compassionate toward others and pray for them—is also hardly susceptible to such distortion. David R. Hawkins
• Operationally, there is just one single recurrent ‘sin’, which is that of error, ignorance, misperception, mistake, or miscalculation. It is a consequence of a limitation of human consciousness. Self-forgiveness is facilitated by humility and acceptance of this limitation. David R. Hawkins
• Paradoxically, some aspects of the church came to represent the opposite of the teachings of its founder, whose essence was based on seeing sin as due to ignorance, and mercy and forgiveness as overriding principles, which Jesus demonstrated under the most extreme conditions possible. David R. Hawkins
• Sin is aligned with falsity. David R. Hawkins
• I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance. Adlai E. Stevenson
• To be unconscious means just that; thus, ‘sin’ can be seen really as a limitation in the evolution of consciousness. This limitation was termed ‘ignorance’ by both the Buddha and Jesus Christ. David R. Hawkins
• There is no sin but ignorance. Christopher Marlowe
• False belief keeps us from living in the way, the truth, and the life. It is our illusions that separate us from the indwelling spirit of God. Doug Hammack

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The truth is that sin and shame do not define our true essence

• Sin and shame do not define us. Nor do we need to drive ourselves to earn worth or value. Simply by virtue of our existence, we are breathtakingly precious, extraordinarily magnificent, and essentially made of the same stuff God is made of. Doug Hammack
• As formidable a foe as sin is, we cannot mistake it for the self. Doug Hammack

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Yes, it’s true there is both good and bad in us…

• It is a universally recognized human experience that there are two natures within us. We see in ourselves the noble and the divine; we see virtue, graciousness, and decency. But we also carry within ourselves the ignoble, the base, the scandalous, the unethical, and the indecent. Doug Hammack

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…but it’s also true that the way out of the negative is not to focus on the negative but rather to focus on the positive

• The way out of conflict is not to try to eliminate the negative but instead to choose and adopt the positive. David R. Hawkins
• With inner awareness, religious guilt and preoccupation with sin diminish and instead, one chooses positive options rather than being controlled by negative programs resulting in shame, fear and guilt. David R. Hawkins
• Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation. John Jay Chapman
• Life has a bright side and a dark side, for the world of relativity is composed of light and shadows If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil, you yourself will become ugly Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty. Paramahansa Yogananda

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Instead of obsessing over sin, we should aim to reconnect with our true selves…

• Once we define the spiritual journey as a battle with sin, we don’t focus on returning to our true selves. Doug Hammack
• But note what we are not saying. We are not saying that our essential divine nature has somehow disappeared or been fundamentally altered. Instead, we’re saying that our human race has become disconnected from our true, divine centers. A sinful nature has become an overlay on our true centers, a veneer that profoundly and negatively impacts our lives, but never removes or replaces our truest nature. Doug Hammack
• The spiritual journey, then, becomes about finding our true selves rather than having our true selves fixed or altered. The spiritual life, the experience of “being saved,” is about being restored to what already is, not about becoming something fundamentally different. Doug Hammack

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…remembering who we are in order to dispel our illusion and ignorance…

• Missing is any payment required for sin as a legal infraction. In its place is the quest for truth and freedom. In its place is remembering who we are and walking in newness of life because we rediscover our divine centers and live from the imago Dei. If sin originates in false belief, salvation isn’t about payment, offended holiness, or blood sacrifice. False belief keeps us from living in the way, the truth, and the life. It is our illusions that separate us from the indwelling spirit of God. Doug Hammack

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…so that we can rediscover and rest in our divine nature

• A sin-focused story misses the point. It makes us think about human nature selectively. We heed carefully those scriptures that speak of sin and shortcomings, but ignore those that tell us our nature is fundamentally of God. We see ourselves behaving badly: thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that are hurtful, and we believe this is the truest part of ourselves. Doug Hammack

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We need to realise there is inherent goodness in us all and virtue is about tapping into that    

• Virtue sounds lofty, but it’s actually down to earth. It simply means living from your innate goodness, guided by principle. When you are virtuous no matter what other people do, their behavior is not controlling you. Rick Hanson
• You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you. Eckhart Tolle
• Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig. Marcus Aurelius
• When you learn to embrace your self with a sense of appreciation and affection, you begin to glimpse the goodness and light that is in you and gradually you will realize that you are worthy of respect from yourself. John O’Donohue
• Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own good. Pablo Casals
• Spirituality is natural goodness. God is not a person; God is a presence personified in us. Spirituality is not a thing; it is the atmosphere of God’s Presence, goodness, truth, and beauty. Ernest Holmes
• I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being. Hafiz of Shiraz
• Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion. Tara Brach

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Rethinking the doctrine of original sin is more conducive to our well-being and our spiritual evolution…

• Rethinking our doctrine of original sin deepens our spiritual lives, awakens us to the imago Dei within us, orients us to the quest before us, and makes allies instead of adversaries with our co-travelers on this journey. Doug Hammack
• If you knew the true value of yourself, you will never allow yourself to be humiliated by committing sins. Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya
• To me the thought of oneself as low and humble is a sin and ignorance. Swami Vivekananda

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…as well as how we relate to God, other people and the planet

• Quite regularly we step away from that narrative and emphasize union with God as our deepest identity. When this is our story, we tend not to collaborate with empires. At these times, we stress that matter does matter, and that we must revere the physical world. At these times we teach one another to experience God’s presence in the created world, and that the entire universe is alive with the movement of Spirit. Doug Hammack