First Meditation: Who Is God? 75ruin would be to adopt "evil" as the sole plausible moral "pro-
portion" between God and creatures. Here, at least, is a predi-
cate whose semantic integrity can remain intact right to the
very end of the story most Christians tell of God.
Nor am I speaking of a few marginal, eccentric sects
within Christian history; I mean the broad mainstream: par-
ticularly, I suppose it pleases me to say, but not exclusively, in
the West. Let us, briefly, dwell on the obvious. Consider (to
begin with the mildest of moral difficulties) how many Chris-
tians down the centuries have had to reconcile their con-
sciences to the repellant notion that all humans are at con -
ception already guilty of a transgression that condemns them,
justly, to eternal separation from God and eternal suffering,
and that, in this doctrine's extreme form, every newborn in-
fant belongs to a massa damnata, hateful in God's eyes from
the first moment of existence. Really, no one should need to be
told that this is a wicked claim: Gaze for a while at a newborn
baby, and then try to believe earnestly and lovingly in such a
God. If you find you are able to do so, then your religion has
corrupted your conscience. But we can avoid affective argu-
ments here. The claim is manifestly a contradiction in terms:
The very notion of an "inherited guilt" is a logical absurdity,
rather on the order of a "square circle." All that the doctrine
can truly be taken to assert, speaking logically, is that God will-
fully imputes to innocent creatures a guilt they can never have
really contracted, out of what from any sane perspective can
only be called malice. But this is just the beginning of the prob-
lem. For one broad, venerable stream of tradition, God on the
basis of this imputation consigns the vast majority of the race
to perpetual torment, including infants who die unbaptized-
though one later, intenerating redaction of the tale says that
at least the youngest of these children, though forever denied