I distort for the sake of modern men who have trouble focusing upon reality. Apes are our cousins, not our ancestors; the terms used for the common ancestors of men and ape seem to change every few years or so. And those ancestors were only killers part of the time, perhaps less often than modern Americans would desire for themselves—see my essay, Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American. The sex-crazed business is perhaps less of an exaggeration for us and for our ancestors.
Sin is a part of this mortal reality. The Church has admitted evolution is a part of this mortal reality. Our ancestors weren’t pure creatures born in a state of grace but rather had the usual bundle of traits, some noble and some useful and some despicable and well-described as `sinful’ for a morally aware creature.
What sense are we to make of this statement found in an article reprinted at Cardinal outlines possible paths to Communion for divorced, remarried:
From the first moments of creation, the cardinal [Walter Kasper] said, God intended man and woman to be together, to form one flesh, to have children and to serve him together. But sin entered the world almost immediately, which is why even the Bible is filled with stories of husbands and wives hurting and betraying one another, he explained.
Let’s try this one again.
We are the products of messy and often bloody processes of evolution and development. There was no time in this mortal realm of Creation when there were any human beings in a state of grace such that they had a choice to first sin or to remain sinless. In other words, specific sins were always options from the first morally self-aware human but sinlessness was never on the table. Moreover, our last common male ancestor most likely lived thousands of years, or more, apart from our last common female ancestor.
When our ancestors became aware of sin, they were in a state of sin because it was the state of a human animal. Our ancestors didn’t fall so much as they entered into a long communal process of listening to… Spirits? No, gods… A God. An incarnate God who offered a share of His life, a life which promised sinlessness.
The invitation came to share a life which was outside of the struggles of this mortal realm where we, in fact, often face the need to risk sin to do our duty to others or to remain truly alive. This world is preparation for an everlasting version of…this world. It is not a place where the peace of sinlessness was ever a possibility.
Heaven may well have many who were quite the sinners on earth, not hateful sinners but rather sinners pursuing the good things of God’s world too aggressively or too often or simply in the wrong way.
Heaven may not have many honest-to-God Puritans because the sheer abundance of a life shared with God would be repulsive to them.
I have to admit I can’t understand the state of mind of someone who can accept evolution as the story of life and of the origins of human life and then talk as if there were a story of a fall from grace into sin of the same but different human race which had evolved and which lived in a messy and bloody world. There is but one human race: the sex-crazed, killer apes, so to misleadingly speak.
But I did write a novel about a modern man who was quite divided in mind as he attempted to meet all the irreconcilable expectations of his life: A Man for Every Purpose.
Convinced to the depths of my mind that there is one created reality, though awfully complex and multi-layered, and, hence, one story of the human race which includes the truths of the Bible and those of empirical knowledge, I can only work to produce a draft version of that story. As it turns out, I produce only some commentary and a few stories which end up being only snapshots of these complex processes of development of a species at a certain stage of evolution and mostly in a state of civilizational decay. The interested reader can download the catalog of my writings: Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston.