Created Guilty

How "God's" Rules Turn Human Nature Against Itself

By: HRH Prince Gharios El Chemor of Ghassan Al-Nu'Man VIII

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

What happens when human beings are created with powerful needs, commanded to suppress them, and then made to feel guilty for struggling?

Created Guilty examines one of the most uncomfortable questions in Christian theology: whether certain religious rules can be reconciled with the human nature God is said to have created. Rather than assuming that every desire is morally permissible, it carefully distinguishes between rules that protect others from violence, coercion, exploitation, and betrayal and prohibitions that restrict legitimate human goods without preventing comparable harm.

At the center of the book is the Created Burden Principle and its practical instrument, the Fair Divine Law Test. Together, they ask whether a restricted drive is deep and generally good, whether the person chose the condition that makes the rule burdensome, whether the resulting suffering is serious and foreseeable, whether meaningful accommodation exists, and whether the prohibition is truly necessary to prevent comparable or greater harm.

Strict sexual exclusivity and unequal desire provide the central case, but the argument extends far beyond monogamy and sexual ethics. Through accessible discussions of psychology, sexuality research, attachment, autonomy, conscience, pleasure, fasting, recognition, self-defense, reproductive longing, grief, religious belonging, and meaning, the book investigates how rules attributed to God interact with the realities of embodied human life.

Created Guilty also addresses the strongest theological responses, including original sin, disordered desire, divine mystery, obedience, grace, free will, and promised compensation in an afterlife. It explains why naturalness alone cannot establish moral permission while challenging the assumption that labeling a burden “God’s will” is enough to establish its justice.

Written from within a Christian standpoint, this is neither a rejection of God nor a demand for one predetermined reform. It is a rigorous mainstream examination of biblical ethics, religious guilt, faith and reason, human suffering, and the responsibility carried by anyone who attributes restrictive rules to a perfectly good creator.

If a rule truly comes from God, it should withstand the standards of divine justice. When it does not, the burden of proof belongs not to the person taught to feel guilty, but to those who claim that God required the deprivation.