British prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels has made a study of the sin nature, and how we moderns develop creative modern ways to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

He writes, “The disposition to excuse ourselves is an old one, remarked upon by Shakespeare, among others. Edmund in King Lear says that "we make guilty of our own disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on . . ."

“Yes, indeed, that is how we are. My patients are always saying things like "The beer went mad" to explain their habitual drunkenness, as if beer drank them rather than the other way about. Inanimate objects take on a life of their own, as if they had free will, or at least agency, not the men who created or used them.

“Nine out of ten people who stab someone to death say "The knife went in," rather than "I stabbed him." One man who had shot someone in a pub brawl said to me, in the course of his narration: "A gun arrived and it went off." Guns are strange creatures, unpredictable in their conduct.

“It is not only objects that have independent volitions, but human interactions, which are no respecters of the people involved in them. Thus fights break out, as if they existed antecedently to anyone's decision to hit someone else; relationships, by contrast, break down. "It" didn't work out; or "it" wasn't working. "It" turns out to be shorthand for every possible kind of infidelity, violence, cruelty, abuse, neglect and so forth.

“Substances, too, have a will of their own. About a half of heroin addicts, when asked why they started, say, "It's everywhere," the "it" in question being heroin. Thus they take heroin for the same reason that mountaineers climb Everest: because it is there. But if it's everywhere, why doesn't everyone take it? This is not a question that much preoccupies my patients.

“Shakespeare wouldn't have been surprised by any of this, of course, since it accords perfectly with human nature as he knew it. What might have surprised him, however, what is genuinely new and what he surely would never have guessed, is that an entire [welfare] class has grown up whose livelihood depends upon the acceptance at their own word of those who make guilty of their own disasters the sun, the moon and the stars.”