ABSTRACT
Of all Religion’s parts, its first has received the most attention. It contains some of Kant’s most important (and most cryptic) discussions of philosophical anthropology. It also contains one of the most infamous of his moral theses: that the whole of the human species “by nature is evil” (6:21). We may consider this claim to be the first datum of Religion’s experiment, the first point of overlap between the Pure Rational System of Religion and traditional Christian doctrine, as it is how Kant presents the doctrine of Original Sin.
