of human beings in an utterly ruined state, a state from which we are unable to deliver ourselves and in which we might all have been left to perish, and justly so. If sin is only an imperfection, a marring of something once perfect and able to become so again, then it is not really right to call it sin, or even to look down on it as something less desirable than the next inevitable stage of evolution. This line of thinking eliminates the possibility of any meaningful talk about virtue. Nobody can