The sloe gin and my iced coffee arrived.
He offered to pay—a unique point—clumsy, but pleasant.
George looked him over twice. George had never seen a clergyman in my haunts, except my father, whom he knew.
"I believe in Original Sin," I said, when George went and when the parson had taken a cool, deep pull, "since I believe every religion is the attempt, the compulsive and unconscious attempt, to make a schemata of instincts that will be palpable to the sense perceptions of human personality—and since I also believe that religions have generally failed in that function—causing the sin."
"Failed how?"
"Failed by being turned to the support of the ego."
"But we'd agree with you, there!"
"So I must conclude there is some basic error in the entire religious phenomenon. Believing that religions express a genuine psychological compulsion—a need to discover the inner pattern of behavior, the inner design of consciousness—but observing that the orthodox patterns offered so far have led only to a succession of material advances that ended in social collapse—I must conclude that there is some human error which repeats itself down the millenniums. Some terribly deep perversion of Nature that at first lets man advance a little—then throws him back nearly the whole distance—gets him going once more with a newer, 'truer' religion—and so on, ad infinitum. This perversion is what I call Original Sin."
"Pretty abstract," he said.