I'm sure you've heard it. We all have. "Nobody's perfect!" Nothing new there; we all know that. But we spit it out blithely, not really thinking about it. Let's examine this little two-word phrase a bit more in-depth.

You are having a fight with Friend A (Let's call 'em Alice). You say something hurtful to Alice. Later, your Friend B (Basil) confronts you and says, "That wasn't very nice; you shouldn't have said that to her." Hopefully, you feel guilty and go apologize to Alice. Be that as it may, this is one of those moments when we recognize, Nobody's perfect. You shouldn't have said it, and you know that, but you're not perfect and you did anyway. Pretty obvious.

Case two: Alice and Basil are now having an argument which you are not a part of. Alice says something very hurtful to Basil. Later, you confront her and say, "That wasn't very nice; you shouldn't have said that." Whether she feels guilty and apologizes to Basil or not, we on the outside of this argument can easily say, "Well, nobody's perfect." Yes, Alice did something she shouldn't have done, but she's not perfect.

Now the case is a bit more serious. You are fighting with Basil, and Basil says something that really, really hurts you. You are no longer on the outside, or the one who screwed up. You have been hurt. How do you feel about it? Sad, because Basil said that to you, and quite possiby, Angry at Basil for having said it. Should Alice be silly enough to utter the words, "Oh well, nobody's perfect" to you as an explanation for Basil's actions, you'll probably lambast her for being insensitive to your feelings.

We know that it's true that nobody's perfect, and when we're outside the situation, it's easy for us to intellectually agree to that statement. But when we ourselves have been hurt by others, we want to say it's their fault and they can't just get off by saying, Nobody's perfect.

So which is true? Is it their fault, or is it just because nobody's perfect?

The answer is a bit complicated. Actually, they're both true. Nobody's perfect, but we are all responsible for our actions. As we have said before, evil is a choice, not a disease. It is not something that imposes itself upon your will, it is something you welcome in or banish it from your thoughts.

It comes down to this. We are all responsible for our actions, capable of choosing either good or evil. And sooner or later, we are going to choose evil, because we are not perfect. But not being perfect is not an excuse to do evil, or a way to explain away what we've done. If we do something wrong, as we inevitably will do because we're imperfect, we have to feel sorry for it, apologize for it, and turn away from that wrongdoing.

Enough with moralizing, on to the really philosophical bit.

Why do we even have the saying "Nobody's perfect" to begin with? If it's something obvious, which if we think about it, it really is, and it has always been that way, which in our experience it has, why do we even say it? We don't have a saying "The grass is green" or "Sometimes you stub your toe". Why would we have such an obvious statement as a proverb if we should all know it anyway? The same goes for the saying, "Life's not fair." Yeah, intellectually we all know that, but we keep expecting it to be. And we keep expecting people to be perfect and to not do evil, even though all experience over the course of our lives and the lessons of history have taught us that life isn't fair, and nobody really is perfect. What's going on here?

Somewhere deep down inside, something is telling us that life is supposed to be fair and people are supposed to be able to resist temptation. Somewhere in our minds is the little voice crying out in the darkness: "It's not supposed to be like this!"

Here's something else to ponder, from C. S. Lewis's work Miracles: Why do humans think the dead uncanny? Logically, we know that a corpse is nothing but a body, and many people believe there's no such thing as ghosts. But if death is and always has been, then there should be nothing to creep us out about dead people! And yet, ghost stories that have chilled the blood of our fellow humans for milennia all cause us to ask: Why do we find the dead uncanny and creepy? Once again, there's a voice inside saying, "Body and spirit were not meant to be separated." Death was not meant to occur.

Just a little something to ponder...