Does Man Have a Design Flaw?
One of you wrote a comment the other day. I'm repeating it here because it's honest, and because it says what a great many people think without saying it out loud -
"There is an insane design flaw in human beings (sorry God) but should it really be the main task here on earth to learn to tolerate each other a little more than just barely… The anxious ego gets in the way so much. Almost all over the planet people are fighting the us-and-them fight. And since the first stone was thrown there has been no end to it."
I have heard that one in countless variations over the last many years. Maybe my whole life.
For many years, I think, I agreed with it myself.
I couldn't understand it - and my own thinking didn't allow me to see the deeper layers, because nobody had ever explained to me what a Human Being is, beyond its biology and psychology. So I was stuck. Missing a key.
Only later in my life did it begin to dawn on me, when I got past the net that had been thrown over me, and I would like to share my own words here, because others may be sitting where I sat.
Let me say this first.
She is right about what she sees.
The mechanism is there. It is everywhere, and it is ancient. You can open any newspaper, any history book, any of the great wisdom traditions and yes, any family dinner, and there it is -
"Us and them".
The anxious ego, looking for someone to keep out, so it can hold itself together. She has seen it completely right. At least on one level.
But that is not what I want to write about.
It's the word.
Design flaw.
Or.
Man as a Design Flaw.
And let me say it straight away, so nobody is in any doubt.
This post is about the Evil we humans do to each other. Not about earthquakes. Not about the sick child. That is a different question, and it deserves its own room.
This is about what we might call "the Stone in the Hand".
....
Try the thought experiment first.
Rewind all the way back to the Beginning. And then imagine that God had fixed the flaw.
Imagine a Human Being who COULD NOT turn away. A Human Being who couldn't choose envy, couldn't throw the stone, couldn't shut the door on his brother. A Human Being in whom the Good was built in, the way gravity is built into the relationship between a stone and the earth.
What do you have then?
You don't have A Good Human Being. You have a well-functioning animal. Or a machine. Something that "does the right thing" because it can't do anything else, and which has therefore never done a single right thing in its life. A stone doesn't fall "rightly". It just falls.
Love that cannot be refused is not Love. It's a program. Forgiveness that could not have been withheld is not forgiveness. It's a reflex. A yes that doesn't hold the possibility of a no is not a yes... It's a sound.
That is what Freedom is. Not a flaw in the design, but the design ITSELF. The one place in the whole visible world where something can CHOOSE the Good WILLINGLY and therefore MEAN it.
The price of that possibility - the only possible price - is that the same being can also choose the opposite.
That is the span in which Man - you - was created, woke up and was placed to live your life.
Freedom.
Did you catch that?
God could not have given us the one without the other. Not because God is not Almighty, but because "a free being that cannot choose wrong" doesn't exist. Not even as a possibility. It's a contradiction in terms. Like a square circle. There is nothing there to create.
....
So what does that mean?
In the story we live inside here in the Western world, we explain it by saying that we have fallen. Yes. But notice the order, because the order is the whole thing.
We are not free because we fell.
We fell because we were free.
It is one of our oldest stories.
The Fall is not the flaw. The Fall is the proof. You cannot fall from something you could not have chosen to stay in. An animal doesn't fall. A machine doesn't fall. Only the one who could have said yes can say no. And that is the span we have woken up in - flesh and spirit, a being that can see The Good and still reach for the other thing, and that KNOWS afterwards that it did.
That last part matters. The knowing. The shame afterwards. That isn't a flaw in the system either. It's the proof that you knew it while you were doing it. A stone isn't ashamed of falling.
But you are.
So you must be something else...
....
And notice here that the comment said -
"... since the first stone was thrown...."
Maybe she did, but I don't think she knew how precisely she hit the mark. Because the Bible is about two stones.
The first one is thrown at the beginning. Cain and Abel are the first two brothers in the Story, the sons of Adam and Eve. Both bring an offering to God, and Abel's is accepted, Cain's is not. And then the thing she describes happens - the anxious ego. Cain cannot bear that his brother is seen and he himself is not. The anxiety turns into envy, the envy turns into hatred, and the hatred turns into a blow out in the field. And he becomes history's first Murderer.
And now listen to what God says to him BEFORE it happens, because that is the sentence this whole post rests on -
"Sin is crouching at the door. It wants to have power over you. But you must rule over it."
You must rule over it.
Not - I have removed it for you.
Not - you can't help it.
God points at Cain and says - this is yours. Your heart. Your hand. Your choice.
And Cain chooses.
As we do.
Direction.
Every day.
"Up or Down?"
He chose down.
And that is the first stone, and it has never stopped flying since. Us-and-them is not a political invention. It is Cain resolving his anxiety by finding someone who isn't him.
The second stone is never thrown.
Many hundreds of years later a woman stands in the middle of a crowd of men with stones in their hands. She has been caught in adultery, and the Law of Moses is clear on that point - she is to be stoned. The men ask Jesus what he thinks. Not because they want to know, but because they want to trap him. They know his forgiving nature, and they know he loses whatever he answers - if he says "stone her", the forgiving man is gone. If he says "let her go", he breaks the Law.
He bends down, writes in the dust, stands up and says - "let the one among you who is without sin throw the first stone."
And then they leave. One by one. The eldest first.
No stone is thrown. Not because the stones were taken from them. Not because the law was repealed. But because every single man in that circle, in that moment, turned his gaze inward and found Cain in there.
Freedom was not taken from them. Freedom was used. To put the stone down.
That is the distance between the two stones. That is the whole history of Man. And notice that not one single thing in the design was changed along the way. Same hands. Same anxiety. Same ego. The only thing that happened was that someone got them to see themselves before they looked at her.
"Oh well... there was that time when I myself..."
....
And now to what lies underneath, which I know bothers a lot of people, just as it has bothered me -
God is Good, and God is in Control. How can both be true, when the world looks the way it does?
They can, because control doesn't mean what most of us walk around thinking it means.
God is not in control of your next step. If he were, you wouldn't be free, and then everything I have written above would be a lie. God is in control of the frame. Of the outcome. Of what is left standing in the end, when every choice has been made.
The difference is the one between a father and a puppeteer. The puppeteer holds the strings and decides every move. The father holds the house. He decides that there IS a house, that the door can't be locked from the inside, that none of the children can burn it down, and that there is always a Way Home, no matter how far they have wandered.
But he doesn't decide whether you go.
That is the control we are talking about. Not that you can't throw the stone, but that the stone can't change what is True. Not that you can't turn away, but that there is no place you can turn to where The Good has stopped being Good and the way home is closed.
The Lie can win a day, a year, a century. But it cannot win. Not because it doesn't try. Because it cannot move God.
That is what makes it possible for God to be Good and in Control at the same time, while Cain walks around out there with the Stone in his Hand. The good is secured. That is not the same as every move being secured. The game is won. But YOU still decide how you play.
Up or down?
....
And so we come down to what I actually think the comment was about. And I say this with love, because I know it from myself.
I don't think you wish for a different Human Being. One without the "design flaw".
If you really listen inside, you don't wish to be a stone that falls rightly.
You want your Love to be YOURS. You want your forgiveness to cost something, because otherwise it's worth nothing. You want the YES you say to someone to have been able to be a no, because otherwise it isn't YOU saying it.
What you may be wishing for is something else.
That you weren't the one who had to keep yourself in check. That it wasn't you who, every single day, had to turn your own Heart around, again, because it turned away again last night. That there was a flaw, and that it was God's, so the task could lie somewhere other than with you.
I can understand that. Most of us can. It is heavy to be Free. It is the heaviest thing there is. That is why so many would rather have an ideology, a system, a group, an us-and-them that takes the task off their hands and tells them who to be angry at. Cain found someone to point at too.
But the task is yours. Just as it was for Cain. It was for the men with the stones. God didn't take it from them.
And he doesn't take it from you, because the day he did, would be the day you stopped being what you are -
A Human Being.
…
God has given you Freedom.
What you do with it is not a question for Him.
It is a question for you.
Up or Down?
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good weekend, friends ☀️
