Thursday, March 06, 2008

Today's quote

”Instead of owning responsibility and allowing sin and guilt to be laid at his or her feet, the post-industrialized self lives as a moral centrifuge, spinning on the axes of scientific, social and therapeutic justification. Responsibility is thrown off into ‘prior causes. . . such things as childhood trauma, unconscious conflict, or biochemistry’. Psychologist search for the trauma that has shaped our dysfunctional self, beginning almost from the moment the zygote of our existence was formed. Influenced by psychological and sociological theory, academics offer to us their theories about the effects on behaviour of poverty, parental abuse and environmental factors. These external forces are to be held responsible, not the ‘innocent’ individual. Even the societies in which we live find it increasingly difficult to charge the individual with moral misdemeanour, opting instead to excuse each other, unsure of the boundaries or matrices by which social relations should be determined.”— Atonement for a "Sinless" Society p. 28-29

No comments: