We’re revisiting another protestantistic phrase – Everyone’s a bitch/Everyone’s selfish etc. We hear this a lot when people complain e.g about their organizations: No one’s good. Each one looks after his interest.
I experienced this myself recently where I work when I felt tempted to say this about a colleague: He’s a bitch…and then suddenly reminded myself: Yeah, he’s acting like a pain in many places but he is good because he comes from God.
The limitation that we have when we say: everyone is bad and only seek their own interest, is that we fail to distinguish the relative part of people’s everyday life from what they actually are – men who have come from God created for goodness and created good, are good in themselves because they have their origin in God. The relative misery of their lives (relative because they may have done hundreds of good things until this incident which ocassioned you to experience their meanness) makes us feel like all people are horrible varying in degrees which gives rise to other sayings as: Trust No one etc.
At the metaphysical level, we are created good. And that’s that. All of us need God’s help. The rest is the story of our lives, good choices and bad. This is why the proper response to the awareness of the nature of evil manifested in peolpe’s failings is to look at events with the eyes of mercy rather than exclaim with a protestantistic world-view: No one is your friend. etc.(i.e in the protestantistic world-view only God is good, the rest are all sinners who can’t be trusted)
We are philosophy 