Shouldn’t the Good Guys Be Better than This? (IV)

I think the answer to the question of why so many Catholics sin in obvious contravention to the Gospels, and despite the help of grace, can be boiled down to three parts.

(1)   Free will.

(2)   Original sin.

(3)   Are you so sure?

I’ll talk about each of these parts in an upcoming post, but preview the answers here, since the short phrases may seem absurdly glib, especially as they are hardly original as responses to this problem.

(1)   Free will means that people often resist what they know to be in their best interests, e.g., I resist eating raw vegetables and exercising.

(2)   Original sin means that even when we know our own best interests, we generally know them only partly, and with mixtures of other information, e.g., I know that exercise is good for me but I don’t know all the details of how running helps my heart and mood levels and gee that was a really good episode of the Mandalorian; I wonder if that actor was in the other thing that I saw with the friend whose hair is really too good to be true but how much time does it take to take care of that, and you just have to prioritize some things over others in life, like parents deciding whether to homeschool their kids or not, which is a really dicey topic these days, but it shouldn’t be, unless of course we start turning into France after the election, which would be weird but not entirely far-fetched, given the history of …

(3)   I’m not convinced that Catholics who resort frequently to the sacraments are not, in fact, better at following the Gospels than other people.  I would love to see some actual research on this.  I’m not sure how you’d conduct a double blind study, but I think it might almost be done … and even a less well conducted study would be well worth the reading.