Thomas on Sin

In response to “Turning to the Church for Answers,” Commentary, April 7: Cal Thomas says that the recent upswing in interest about Jesus Christ is a result of our newfound awareness that the ills of humanity are the result of our failure in the past few years to recognize that “elemental humanity is depraved.”

In a remarkable subversion of logic he uses the Holocaust as proof that we have been on the wrong course. He conveniently ignores the fact that human depravity was the dominant belief system in the world that produced Adolf Hitler. Indeed, the thousands of years of belief in the essential evil of humanity has done nothing to reduce slaughter and depravity.

On the contrary, teaching human beings that they are, in their truest sense, good, is a far more reasonable approach toward mediating evil. It takes very little effort to observe that persons who believe themselves to be bad consistently do bad things whereas persons who have healthy self-respect are far more likely to behave as Jesus would want us to behave.

EDWARD C. MARTIN

Newport Beach