“When the sun is goin’ down
and there is no place to hide
Even in the brightest light
you might lean toward the darker side”
-Bruce McCabe
Someone asked me, recently, “Are people born good and turned evil or are they born evil and kept away from it until unfortunate circumstances? Or are they born blank!?”
The following is my response, which I think happens to also be a wonderful comment on the current season and the epic chain of events that it has brought on me and several of the people around me. And so I give to you more of my blind religion/heresy (depending on which side of the proverbial fence you like to burry your face in the sand on. . .forgive me. That was too harsh. 
).
I’m a proponent of a sort of bastardized version of Tabula rasa (Blank Slate Theory) which states that “individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, ‘blank’, and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world.”
I’m not hardcore about it, though, because I do think that there are certain tendencies and traits that are inherent in human beings as a matter of nature. When the doctor slaps the baby’s butt, the baby knows to cry. It doesn’t have to learn that. Nor does it have to learn that tits equal food.
For the most part, though, our behavior and thought patterns and processes are learned—nurture. But there is obviously some nature. Part of that nature, is our sin nature. That, we possess from birth.
That is not to say that a child is born evil and with some desire to do only evil. But they are born with a nature that is wholly self-serving and self-seeking, with no regard to righteousness (that is, what is right; not just legally and morally, but logically as well. Essentially the opposite of sin), and with little, if any, tendency for compassion, humility, or any other element of love. That is the very definition of sin.
And so we are born, with the exception of those things necessary for survival, cognitively blank, emotionally blank, and spiritually blank. Evil itself is not present in us as nothing is prosent in us, yet, still, our tendency is toward what one might (I do) consider evil.
As we grow and as our thought and behavior becomes more complex, the nature which drives those thoughts and behaviors becomes less obvious. And, indeed, the illusion of selflessness is often given. But I like to compare that the The Doctor from Star Trek Voyager. Although he was nothing more than a bunch of lines of code and a holographic projector, he appeared no less human than anyone else. Oftentimes, it was not until someone tried to scan him that they realized that he did not even really exist. Yet, although every action was predetermined, there was an illusion of choice and, although he had no true emotions to speak of, there was an illusion of compassion. So it is for us.
Make sense? Questions? Comments? Bullshit?
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