DISPUTATIONS WRITES: “The idea of each of our sins, however slight, being complicit in every evil experienced by everyone who ever lived is striking to me, too. That’s why it became its own post, instead of just the two-paragraph intro to another post I’d originally planned.

“I’m not sure that it’s *true*, though. I came by it through manipulating a principle of apocalyptic literature, and I’m not even sure I understand the principle as it applies directly to literature. Whether it has any metaphysical application at all, I don’t know.

“But at the very least, pretending that it does preserves and highlights the simply stinky badness of sin, without which we’re all (at best) Pelagians.”