Why Static Goodness of Innocence in Lack of Badness can be Overture to Corruption in the Garden of our Souls

Ah, dear reader, you’ve returned, thank God! Let us contemplate a most curious paradox: that innocence, often hailed somehow as the purest form of goodness, is not actually goodness in itself. It is, rather, an empty vessel, the garden untouched by seed or soil; a place where the roots of neither sin nor virtue have yet to take hold. To mistake innocence for goodness is to confuse the absence of corruption with the presence of internal strengths; it is to believe that a field without weeds is a flourishing orchard, when in truth it is merely a plot of earth waiting for the first drop of rain.

Innocence, you see, is not a state of perfection but a condition of vulnerability. It is the child who has never known the sting of deceit; the heart unmarred by the weight of choices and not yet disabused of naive trust: the soul untouched by the trials that shape us into something more. Yet, this is precisely what makes the innocent susceptible to the sly whispers of temptation. For goodness is not born in stillness; it is forged in contemplation of motion, engineered in discourse, shaped by action, and refined through progress. Goodness for the virtuous is to be a human whose soul thrives on the friction between potential and reality, always looking for outcomes of greatest good. This is a far cry from the passive state of innocence often promoted as goodness.

Imagine a child, wide-eyed and untouched by the world’s complexities. This child is innocent, yes: pure in their ignorance of evil. But innocence is not a virtue. It is merely lack of experience or education, awaiting the challenges that will demand choices, and the trials that will carve the soul into something greater or cut it down into hatred. So then the trust of innocence is a slab of marble, which will either be blown away entirely rendering the person dead in the soul and hateful, or carved into something beautiful, and therefore promising and teeming in potential. The soul untouched by hardship cannot grasp the weight of courage. Goodness, in all its radiant splendours, is not found in the absence of evil but in the act of choosing to fight it. Fight evil. Preserve innocence, not for the sake of innocence itself, but for goodness sake. Be biased towards life and goodness, for you depend on them and they are most biased toward you.

Be biased towards life and goodness, for you depend on them and they are most biased toward you.