Are humans inherently good?
Wikipedia writes about the universalist George de Benneville (1703-1793):
"He also preached that each human being has a dualistic nature; the outer, flesh-and-blood person is subject to the evils of the world and may choose to do good or to do wrong, while the inner, spiritlike person is crafted by God and is perfect, immaculate, and holy, and cannot be damned. Therefore, all human beings experience salvation."
There is a good quote from the New Age mystic Eckart Tolle (b.1948): "Ego is the insanity of the human mind, not our true identity."
Those with an inclination towards nature spirituality, those who revere nature very much, tend to believe in the inherent goodness of man. Because if nature is good, and we come from nature, we have to be inherently good. Evilness is then something we have learnt from civilization. For example Jean-Jacques Rosseau (1712-1778) held this opinion.
If we are inherently good, salvation is then not something we have to attain, but something we return to. We return to our innermost being. Those religions who do not believe in original sin, who believe in the inherent goodness of man, tend to be non-salvific religions. Animism for example, the religion of the wild indigenous people, is a non-salvific religion.
