Publius Terence Afer - "Terence" - Roman playwright It's hard to translate that proverb accurately. The word Terence used, "alienum," can be translated in various ways, with varying nuances. It is the most difficult word in the phrase to accurately translate. Accordingly, there are many variant translations of what, in Latin, was a simple sentence.

"I am human, therefore everything human is of interest to me."

"I am human, and nothing human is alien to me."

"I am a man, so nothing of man is foreign to me."

and so on...

So, we might well take into consideration the advice of another famous Roman writer, Horace, when he says: "Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus interpres"

"As a true translator you will take care not to translate word for word"

"Alienum" could fairly be rendered as "alien," "foreigner" (which is what Romans meant by "alien", not little green men) or "stranger," as in someone from another land.

The word "homo" also lends itself to a choice - do we translate it as "man," or as "human"? In English, the words have slightly different flavors.

So, the phrase comes to mean, "I am a man/human, so nothing of men/humans is alien/strange/foreign to me" or perhaps "nothing men/humans do is alien/strange/foreign to me"

It seems to me that the thought is best captured, at least in English, by expressing the thought in the positve sense, saying, "I am human, so all humans are one with me."

In this, it seems to presage Donne's Meditation XVII: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."

Translation issues aside, what does this statement truly mean?

All of humanity is united in both our history and our potential. In every man or woman, there is bravery and cowardice, jealousy and generosity, nobility and baseness. There is no act any human has ever performed that is not in our range of potential. There is no depravity or cruelty that each of us, given the required combination of circumstance, nativity and nurture, might not perform, (witness the tragic environment of those children born in the West Bank, trained from infancy to hate Jews and aspire to become human explosive delivery agents) nor no heroism or achievement we might perform under other combinations, (witness the actions of the passengers of Flight 93, who died preventing a larger tragedy)

This is a thought that should both terrify and inspire us.

The Xians acknowledge this, at least subconsciously, when they mutter the phrase, "There but for the Grace of God..." They have little option other than to consider it this way, as according to their holy book, (Ephesians, 2:8-9) their salvation is a gift, and one not given to all, or even most, but to a fortunate few, at least based on the latest estimates of Xianity as a proportion of the world's religious.

How the all-merciful Xian god could condemn a Palestinian child, bred and bent to disdain the Xian faith, to eternal damnation, for not having the faith he did not see fit to give him, I will leave for one of their scholars to explain - I confess I'm not smart enough to resolve that contradiction.

In their exclusivity, they mirror their dread foes, the Islamic world, and, in their common ancestral monotheistic doctrine, display the fact that they resemble each other much more than they differ. It is a family resemblance that embarrasses them both, though I'm not sure which one more.

The Islamicists are hell-bent on making the world in their image of morality. Despite the emergence of a kinder, gentler form of Xianity in the last century, there are still some preachers that do too.

To me, though, even more tragic than the Believer's division of the world and it's peoples into the Saved and the Damned, is the internal conflicts this inevitably creates in the mind of the faithful, when that persons own natural thought processes are turned against them, and create guilt or shame. How so, you say?

According to the Bible, and my discussions with Xians like Macker, to even "think" about doing something evil is a sin.

I disgree. There is no "thoughtcrime." There can be no sin, no harm, without an observable behavior.

As an example:

I'm in the grocery store. I see a pretty nubile teenage girl. She's dressed in a revealing fashion. I, and every other healthy male that sees her, from puberty to the grave, am going to feel, if only for the briefest of instants, a twinge of sexual attraction to her.

That's human nature, my natural, healthy, libido, screaming at me. Everybody feels it, few will admit it. Any man that denies it is lying, if only to himself.

The Xians call this Original Sin. And is says right there in their handbook, the Bible, that I just sinned.

Colossians 3:5 "Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry."

Matthew 5:28 "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Now, I'm willing to at least entertain an argument that if I actually slept with a teenage girl, then that's a sin, even though I don't really believe that to be absolutely true in all cases. But, for me to consider it, think about it, be tempted by it? No. Not at all.

But, according to the Xians, it is entirely possible to be sitting alone, motionless, on some mountaintop, and commit a sin. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, a standard of guilt or innocence that no human court (save maybe one of Orwell's) would support.

Perhaps we should leaven this anaysis with a quote fron C.S. Lewis: "He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart."

We all have a Dark Side, an inner Bad Person that suggests that we do things we know to be wrong. Xianity requires that we cannot accept the Dark Side at what it is, a normal, integral part of us. Because this exists within us, the Xians conclude that we're sinners. Welcome to the concept of Original Sin. Doomed not by what we do, but by what we are.

Yet Jesus, the Sinless One, the Pure Lamb, was tempted, was he not? If we are to believe the Bible, I can think of two ocassions - the first when the Devil tempted him during the forty days in the desert, (Matthew 4:1-11) and the second, as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, and asked that this "cup" be removed from him. God sends him an angel to strengthen him; presumably, his resolve. (Luke 22:42,43) Surely this cannot be seen as anything other than Jesus being tempted to not undergo this painful death on the cross - that's the way it was always presented to me during my years of religious education. Clearly, then, merely to be tempted cannnot be a sin, unless we are to conclude that Jesus was a sinner.

Macker writes in his journal: marcus likes to chide me that the extended gaze I may make at a shapely figure is entirely natural, and he would be right. but the logical argument I seem perpetually unable to make is that is exactly the problem. it is the very reason adam and eve angered God: they let themselves commune with the creation to the exclusion of the Creator. they set, and fell for, their own self-made trap.

And a bit later: "anything that takes our focus off of knowing, serving and intimately interacting with a holy God is the trap of a carnal mind..."

And there, (viola! ici! eureka!) we have the point of divergence, the manner in which two reasonably sincere and intelligent men derive two completely different answers to an ethical question, by virtue of the underlying axioms taken for granted.

I can see the Creator as being in all of his manifestations. In the wonders of nature - the majesty of a galaxy, or the northern lights, the intricate structure of a dragonfly wing or even just a log rotting away in the forest. In the art of men - a Hendrix solo, and La Pieta. And even in human technology - an oil refinery, a motherboard, or a sniper rifle.

As Pirsig wrote in "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintainence": "The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower."

Finally, the Buddha is there, too, in the things the Xians see as if not sinful, at least a carnal trap. You're just looking at another face(t) of the Creator when you see that pretty young girl, the smile that says "yes," and the face of your lover as the clouds and rain thunder down on her.

Those things aren't "carnal traps" that distract you from communing with God. They are all part of God - when you commune with them, you commune with the Creator.

This is not to say, that these things, although good, cannot be used to bad ends. Sex, rifles, PCs, motorcycles and yes, even religious faith can all be used to sin, despite the Buddha inside.

This very doctrine of pantheism, the belief that God resides in every part of his creation, was in fact abused. Though present and supressed several times in the history in the early church, in the thirteenth century pantheistic Xian believers took the doctrine to an extreme. They argued that since God was in everyone, that everyone was God, (as if a single brain cell is human being) therefore, since God could not sin, they were free to do as they wished. Hundreds were put to the Inquisition and burned at the stake.

This heresy was so severely prosecuted as it attacks the fundamental axiom of the Xian faith - the axiom to which macker subscribes and that I reject - the assumption that we are somehow flawed, that sin is passed from one generation to another via our basic human nature, that we have to be "saved" from anything, that our normal human desires and impulses are somehow "dirty" and need to be restrained and controlled, beyond those practical aspects of ethical socialization that allow us to live harmoniously in groups.

To think that some of creation is apart from the Creator, and therefore evil or sinful, requires that you accept the ancient artificial Platonic division.

The roots of the idea of the physical world as being "dirty" and somehow inferior to the "pure" idealized intangible world of thought arose from Plato's writings. This thinking lives on in Western thought to this very day; we drink it in unquestioned with our mother's milk.

The Xistian religion adopted this philosophical tradition when the first version of Xianity, that of the Jews, was Romanized in the third and fouth century, courtesy of theologians such as Augustine, giving us the lamentable condition in which we find ourselves today.

We all are conditioned to think of many of our thoughts as shameful, "dirty." Not only our actions, but our thoughts.

What does it do to our self-esteem, do you think, to be conditioned to believe that our instinctual desires are somehow wrong, and not the more sane view that those desires, while good, can sometimes tempt us to do wrong things? What burden of mental pain and suffering does this place on our collective spirits? How much of the drug abuse, mental illness, sexual dysfunction, (to include women who cannot mentally "flip the switch" and enjoy sex after marriage, after a childhood and adolescence of being told sex is "bad") and violence comes from the idea that we are all born flawed creatures, somehow imperfect creations of a perfect Creator?

I don't know how this could ever be measured in a scientific manner, as I don't know where one would find a control group of people that had not been contaminated by this indoctrination. However, I am not a trained social scientist - perhaps a clever one could. I suspect, based simply on the anecdotal evidence of my personal observations, that it would be far greater than any of us suspect. Should we ever learn to shed this burden of shame in what we are, and derive a practical ethical system based upon the reunion of the physical and the spiritual that Plato clove in twain, and one which understands that the desires and impulses the Creator endowed us with are there for perfectly legitimate and wholesome reasons, we would soon find our culture a more healthy one in which to live.

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