Are Human Beings Born Innately Good?

If some people are born rotten, are they rotten from the moment they come into the world? Can a newborn baby, seemingly unaware of his own consciousness, deep down be a wretched soul of hideous hatred from the get-go?

Or is it, like most subjects of human substance, an intricate weaving of factors? Self and setting, nature and nurture, are most effectively examined through a lens of integration.

I believe that all hearts enter this world filled with enormous love and divine light. I also believe each heart, soul, spirit, has an individual and highly unique capacity for cruelty. It is each person’s capacity for cruelty that then helps to determine their capacity for corruption, and thus how much of their inner light and love will prevail.

The added elements of environment, nurture and life circumstances serve as the cue ball in this cosmic game of animal pool.

I think it crucial to acknowledge that not one person’s life will ever be totally joyous or totally miserable. There are souls born into lives of extreme comfort, surrounded by constant kindness and treated with care, who slip into a downward spiral of darkness upon their very first encounter with either cruelty or calamity or both.

The same can be said for a person raised in adversity, cultivated through pain, who manages to keep that loving light burning through even the heaviest rain.

These two illustrations, though conceptual samples, are embodied every day through very real people. Seeing as we clearly cannot regard Nurture as the wholly decider of human fate, it begs the emphasis on individual capacity — capacity for cruelty, which sways capacity for corruption, which compels us to behave and to become.

Whether or not you view cruelty and corruption or love and kindness as the external influencing factors in this world, is based solely upon your worldview. I believe the world is naturally a place of love and grace, and so I interpret the constant backdrop, the innate way of things, to be love. If I viewed animosity and malevolence to be the organic way of things, then it would be our capacity for compassion and kindness that determined outcomes.

It is a matter of seeing the world in one of two ways:

1) a Good place with some bad in it

2) a Bad place with some good in it