We Are Fallen

"God certainly did not create us this way.  We are fallen.  All the facts support this view. There is a voice inside our moral conscience that tells us that our immoral and unmoral acts are abnormal.  They ought not to be there.  There's something wrong in us, something dislocated. God did not make us one way.  Or rather, he did make us one way. And we have made ourselves, in virtue of our freedom, in other ways. He wrote the drama: we changed the plot. We are not just animals that failed to evolve into humans. We are humans who have rebelled against the divine.  If we are riddles to ourselves, we are not to put the blame on God or on evolution.  But we are to put the blame on ourselves.  We are not just a mass of corruption, but we bear within ourselves the image of God.  We are very much like a man who has fallen into a well.  We ought not to be there, and yet we cannot get out.  We are sick; we need healing; we need deliverance; we need liberation, and we know very well that we cannot give this liberation and this freedom to ourselves. We are like a fish on top of the Empire State Building. Somehow or other we are outside of our environment. We cannot swim back into the stream.  Someone has to put us back."