Secular humanists rule the world and secular humanists do not recognise any fundamental and unalterable moral failing in the human being. We are basically good even if we have the tendency to go wrong sometimes though if we do that is usually the fault of our environment or experiences rather than some inbuilt defect in our human nature. Evil, insofar as that is acknowledged at all, is caused by illness or bad circumstances.
The Christian Church has a different view. It teaches that as a result of the Fall when Adam and Eve disobeyed God humanity has inherited a strong inclination towards selfishness and sin of various kinds. Theologically this is called original sin. It means we have an indelible stain on our soul or one that was indelible until Christ offered us the chance of redemption through faith in him.
When a secular humanist takes to religion, or spirituality as they would probably prefer to think of it, they take a lot of their secular humanism with them. Thus, although they will usually acknowledge the fact that one needs to transcend the ego to realise spiritual knowledge, knowledge of the knowing by being sort, they will frame this idea in terms of freedom from ignorance or illusion. They will rarely think in terms of sin or spiritual responsibility. It's all more about what they can gain from the transaction rather than putting themselves right with their Creator.
But this is to misunderstand what the human self is and what we should be doing with it. It is not an illusion nor is it the result of ignorance. You might say that undue attachment to it, even over-identification with it, is the problem but the thing itself is real and meant to be. There is still a problem that needs to be addressed but this is not done by denying the real source of the problem. That source is not the self but the self gone wrong. In other words, the fallen self and this is something that needs to be cured rather than simply 'risen above'. You can attain certain mystical states in which the self has indeed been risen above but you will always, yes always, come back down to your self. Then the experience, or the memory of it, may make you feel that you have gone beyond self and your persona will adopt a particular kind of mask to reflect that but you are just deceiving yourself. The sick or fallen self is still there.
The only cure for this is repentance which means genuine contrition for your fallen state. This must be a deeply personal response to a profound realisation of the goodness and perfection of God and the numerous ways in which you fall short. This is why true saints think of themselves as bad people. This is not a pose though obviously it can be when those who are not saints imitate what they think is saintly behaviour. But the true saint will have a sometimes agonising sense of his unworthiness. Clearly, this should not be taken too far to the point where it becomes almost a self-indulgence (all good and true things can be perverted), but the saint will feel the lowly nature of his self precisely because he is aware of the glory of God. This is why all true spiritual experiences lead to humility and reticence rather than the inflated sense of personal worth that the lesser variety of experience, significant as it may seem to the experiencer, may bestow on what you might think of as an unripe or immature soul, one that cannot process its experience in a proper context.
The path to spiritual understanding is not through trying to transcend the ego (what is trying and why?) but through repentance. It is only repentance that can purify the self of what is traditionally described as original sin. But we must go further and say that even repentance by itself is not enough. This is the self washing its dirty clothes but it actually needs a change of garment, and the garment in question is that of Christ which the soul must put on in order truly to be cleansed of the stains of self. These two things, repentance and full acceptance of Christ, are the only things that can cure the soul of its spiritual disease and render it whole. The attempt to transcend the ego without replacing it by the light of Christ can only ever lead to one of the many distorted reflections of the true spiritual world as they exist in the psychic and psychological states of being. It cannot reach the true spiritual level.
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