The battle line between good and evil runs through every human heart, said Solzhenitsyn. Those who attempt to bleach the world of sin are sinners themselves, and the more ambitious they are, the more swaddled up in pride and ignorance they become. People who want to bring heaven up on earth have turned the earth into hell and made rivers run red with blood, because the first thing they must do is the something they cannot do, which is to cure themselves. If we are to be healed, we must walk the way of the Cross. the progressive cannot diagnose his own disease. But that does not mean that he rejects the way of the Cross entirely. He makes everyone else walk it. It is the rule of what the Catholic anthropologist René Girard tabs as the default position of mankind. Do not give up your lusts. Do not sacrifice yourself. Sacrifice the other. Other people must be to blame.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes