You Don't Have to Teach a Child to Sin

A drowning person does not need advice. Not a better technique, not more practice, not one more lifetime to improve his form. He needs someone who is not drowning to reach in and pull him out. Every argument in this article is really just an attempt to show why that picture, and not a gentler one, is the accurate one for the human condition.

You Don't Have to Teach a Child to Sin

No parent sits down with a toddler and teaches her to grab a toy from another child, or to lie about who broke the vase, or to demand her own way before anyone else's. She figures all of that out on her own, early, without instruction. What has to be taught, laboriously and against the grain, is sharing. Patience. Honesty when it costs something. That asymmetry is data, not sentiment: selfishness is the default setting; virtue is the uphill climb.

📖 "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." — Psalm 51:5 (ESV)

David isn't describing a single act here. He's describing a condition present before he was capable of any act at all — which is exactly what Paul means several centuries later with the blunt summary that has never needed much explanation: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Not most. Not the unusually wicked. All.

The Curse

Genesis doesn't describe the Fall as a single bad decision with isolated consequences. It describes a fracture running in every direction at once — between the man and the woman, between humanity and the created world, between humanity and God.

📖 "And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."" — Genesis 3:17–19 (ESV)

Even the ground stops cooperating. Death enters as a fact of biology, not just a metaphor. This series already covered creation groaning under that weight, waiting for release — the point here is narrower: the curse isn't a punishment layered on top of an otherwise intact human nature. Something in the nature itself broke.

A Nature, Not Just a Record

🔯 Hindu Teaching: Karma, as this series has described it, treats wrongdoing primarily as a ledger — individual actions, each generating its own consequence, accumulating and eventually balancing. The problem, on that model, is what a person has done, action by action.

Paul describes something else: not an accumulating record but an inherited condition, present prior to any individual act a person has committed.

📖 "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—" — Romans 5:12 (ESV)

A ledger can, in principle, be balanced by enough offsetting entries. A nature can't be offset. It has to be replaced. That's the difference this whole article is really about, and it's a harder claim than karma's, not a softer one.

Dead, Not Drowning

The opening image undersells the actual claim. A drowning person can still thrash, still cry out, still want to be rescued. Scripture's own language is more severe than that:

📖 "And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked." — Ephesians 2:1 (ESV)

Dead people don't paddle. They don't call for help. They don't contribute anything at all to their own rescue, not even the willingness to be rescued — that has to be given to them too. If this is the right diagnosis, then the drowning image was generous. The actual claim is starker: not a person struggling toward the surface who needs a hand, but a person incapable of struggling at all.

Why This Breaks Every Self-Effort Path, Not Just Karma's

Follow that claim to its conclusion and it doesn't stop at karma. Jnana marga asks the practitioner to realize the truth through their own sustained insight. Bhakti marga asks the devotee to offer genuine surrender. Karma yoga asks for real, disciplined detachment from the fruits of action. Every one of these paths assumes the human being walking it retains enough unbroken capacity to actually do the walking — to realize, to surrender, to detach.

If Ephesians 2 is describing the human condition accurately, that assumption is exactly what fails. It isn't that Hindu paths to liberation ask too much effort and Christianity asks too little. It's that if the will itself is what's broken, no path that starts from inside a broken will can produce what it's aiming at, however sincerely or skillfully it's walked. The rescue has to originate somewhere the drowning person isn't.

What This Means for the Conversation

For the Christian working through this: the point isn't that Christians try less hard than Hindus striving toward moksha. Plenty of Christian life is demanding, disciplined effort. The point is about sequence — effort follows being made alive; it doesn't produce it. Get that order backward in your own head and you'll misrepresent grace as just an easier spiritual technique, which badly understates the claim.

For the Hindu reader working through this: this isn't an argument that your tradition asks too much. It's a question worth answering honestly from your own experience rather than from any tradition's theory: when you've genuinely tried to be better — more patient, less selfish, more honest — has effort alone ever fully closed that gap, or does the gap have a way of reappearing exactly where you thought you'd finally closed it?

💬 Conversation Tip: Ask: "Have you ever tried, really tried, to stop being selfish for a whole day, and actually succeeded?" Almost everyone's answer opens the door to this entire article without you needing to argue a single doctrine.

Made Alive

📖 "But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved." — Ephesians 2:4–5 (ESV)

Not advice to a struggling swimmer. Life given to someone who had none. That's the specific claim underneath every article this series has built toward it — and it's the reason the drowning man in this one doesn't save himself, no matter how the story is told.

Primary Sources Referenced: Psalm 51:5 • Genesis 3:14–19 • Romans 3:23 • Romans 5:12–19 • Ephesians 2:1–10

Scholarly References: John Murray, The Imputation of Adam's Sin (1959) • Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (1995) • D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (2000) • John Stott, The Cross of Christ (1986)

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.