Grigory Rodchenkov who was once the mind behind the elaborate doping program that helped Russia cheat in the Olympics was recently interviewed. He revealed that the competing Olympians of some twenty plus countries regularly use chemical stimulants to improve their performance. The more questions the journalist asked, the wider the problem seemed, until hefinally asked, “Will the Olympic Games ever be clean?”
In his slightly broken English, the Russian official answered, “You could believe, but in fact, it’s human nature; it’s our sins; it’s got nothing to do with sports. There are 10% or 15% who are incorrigible. You can do nothing. They are cheaters by their very nature!.” I do not know the religious background of this man but he identified a few words of the reason for the problems of the planet. Not only in sports, but from banks who profited on housing loans causing the recent recession to the politicians who played the system to finance luxurious vacations at our expense; from businessman who pay themselves 300 times more than their employee while refusing to hire help for their overworked workers because of the “cost”, to false advertisement, scams, hackers and ID thieves, it is all the same. We are dealing with sinful human nature with a percentage of people who are incorrigible. It is easy to blame people’s behaviors on race, religion, or culture. We even sometimes blame it on the circumstances of their youth but the truth really is that we are all created equal. If one is bad, all are bad and if one is good all are good. The whole idea is that whether we believe in God or not, we all have within ourselves the potential to do good, and the equal potential to do evil. What we do with the responsibility of that awesome choice is ours and our Russian official acknowledged that a certain percentage of people in the world seemed to have made the decision to misbehave by acting selfishly and dishonestly. I think that sticks the blame right where it belongs: with us: the universal person. Of all the creatures on the earth, we seem to be the one with the greatest ability to lead our lives through choice instead of by instinct. I saw a little illustration once. It represented the bust of a person with a small devil on one side of his shoulder and and a little angel on the other. Both were having a tug-of-war through the person’s ears thus illustrating that they both had influence on him. The tie would only be broken by the person’s choice. The flame of conscience within us can prevent us from doing the bad thing and even push us toward more unselfish choices. Ultimately, can we really blame our environment for the evil that we do? The choices really belong to us.
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