Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann slices through centuries of theological bookkeeping with a philosopher's impatience for bad accounting. The jab is aimed at a familiar move in Christian apologetics: treat suffering as morally intelligible because humanity is already guilty. Original sin, in that story, functions like a universal liability on the cosmic balance sheet. Kaufmann's point is that the fine print doesn't matter. Whether guilt is inherited through Adam or simply observed as an empirical regularity - people do wrong - the central scandal remains: why is a world structured so that pain is so often disproportionate, indiscriminate, and educational only in hindsight?

The intent is diagnostic. He isn't merely denying a doctrine; he's exposing how it can distract from the real philosophical problem by relocating it into a genealogy of blame. If everyone is tainted from the start, then suffering can be reframed as deserved, or at least unsurprising. Kaufmann refuses that relief. Shifting sin from a metaphysical transmission to a sociological fact doesn't change the moral arithmetic of a child with leukemia, a village erased by an earthquake, or cruelty rewarded in plain sight. The problem of suffering isn't solved by broadening the category of guilt until it covers everyone.

Context matters: Kaufmann, a postwar secular humanist steeped in Nietzsche, had little patience for explanations that protect God's goodness by diminishing human innocence. The subtext is a challenge to theologians: stop hiding behind origin stories and answer the harder question about a reality in which suffering is not neatly tethered to culpability.