What does it mean, in human terms, to be a victim - not in the ancient sense of ritual victim in some contrived act of sacrifice but in the everyday sense of being a victim of misfortune - illness, accident, crime, natural disaster or whatever?

The question is becoming more pressing because every day we hear of more and more sufferings of various kinds all over the world. Partly it is a matter of more news coverage than heretofore; partly it may be that the incidence and severity of suffering is really increasing; partly it may be that we are more aware of it than our forefathers were because of our greater moral sensitivity, our greater shockability. After all, the hanging of a sheep stealer was hardly news two hundred years ago whereas now there is an outcry if such a criminal were to be given what we might deem to be an excessive term in prison.

It seems to me that we are often guilty of deviation from good moral sense in our attitude to victims.

We tend sometimes cruelly to add to the sufferer's troubles by 'blaming the victim'. The 'blame the victim principle' - BVP is very common.

But sometimes we assume that if a person is an innocent victim on the particular occasion then that person must be faultless in every way. We cannot bring ourselves to think that a victim of horrible and undeserved assault may, actually, be a rather flawed person, a person whom we would not admire very much in the ordinary course of events. This sort of deviation might be called 'the immaculate victim principle' - the IVP. (Having in mind some of the simplistic goodie/baddie contrasts in the novels of Dickens, a recent writer termed the immaculate victim principle 'The Little Nell Syndrome'.

What light does godless (i.e atheist, not necessarily anti-god) thought shed on this increasing awareness of victims of various sorts? What does a god-free person have to say about the BVP and the IVP?

It has to be said that the doctrine of Original Sin has a lot to answer for.

If we believe that the troubles of humankind are the consequence - to quote Milton's Paradise Lost "Of Man's first disobedience, the fruit of that forbidden tree ..." then it is easy to think that really it is all our fault that life is so cruel - and thanks only to God that it is not far worse. Skipping over the obvious ethical problem as to why you and I should be penalised for the moral error of someone long since dead - even supposing she ever lived - it is easy to see how the doctrine of Original Sin, in general, can metamorphose into the BVP principle being applied to particular cases.

Given the basic doctrine of Original Sin, it speaks volumes for the kindness and compassion displayed by so many believers that they very often help victims non-judgmentally rather than simply adding blame to the various victims' many burdens.

Perhaps the IVP is a response of decent, but sentimental, people who are vaguely uneasy about the doctrine of Original Sin. If that is the case then embracing the IVP is to go 'over the top' .... is to be patronising and to not accept that every one of us has a certain dignity as his or her due and that this is quite irrespective of the faults and failings we may have.

To be outraged that, say, a black man is penalised for being black does not mean that he is necessarily a nice man who happens to be black; he may be a nasty man who happens to be black. A black man has just as much 'right to be fallible' as anyone else. It is the racists who are so horribly wrong to include his blackness among his failings.

Never mind Sin and never mind Sentimentality; admit that there is such a thing as general human worth and that each of us is a unique living example of, at least some part of, that worth.

Original Sin is not a doctrine that has any place in atheism; we can perhaps identify Original Thoughtlessness and, by thinking, we can, ourselves, do something to remedy that hobbled condition.

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