What deeper thing — moral, spiritual, psychological, or social — does it say is broken?

The inborn compass still points to God, but it is being ignored. Cut off from its Maker, the soul invents its own morality and its own purpose — and neither holds. The emptiness of the richest societies is the symptom.

The deeper flaw, they argue, is psychological: a human tendency to prefer comforting belief over hard evidence — wishful thinking, fear of death, and loyalty to the tribe — which religion, on this view, exploits rather than heals.

The broken thing, on the agnostic account, is intellectual: the habit of believing beyond the evidence. Clifford stated it at maximum strength — 'it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence' — because unearned beliefs spread and corrupt how a whole society thinks.

The human heart. Jesus taught that evil comes from within — 'out of the heart come evil thoughts' (Mark 7:21) — so the deepest break is spiritual: a will turned away from God, which outward law-keeping alone cannot mend.

Not a corrupted nature — Judaism rejects original sin — but broken relationships: between people and God, and between people themselves. The mystics later pictured a fractured world awaiting repair (tikkun olam), mended deed by deed.

The break is in perception itself: we see permanence where everything changes, and a solid self where there is only a changing process — and we build our lives on that mistake. From this ignorance grow craving, aversion, and the suffering they carry.

A case of mistaken identity: people take themselves to be the body, mind, and ego, when the texts say the real self is the deathless atman. Advaita calls this superimposition (adhyasa) — reading the false onto the real — and treats every moral and social ill as downstream of it.

The heart's orientation: the self-willed person (manmukh) has forgotten God. Socially, that forgetting shows itself as caste pride, empty ritual, and religious hypocrisy — the targets of Guru Nanak's sharpest words.

The broken thing it names is political and social: the standing temptation of rulers to compel conscience, and of religious majorities to use the law against dissenters — what Mill called the tyranny of the majority.

Nothing in human nature is held to be metaphysically broken. The deeper failure is ignorance, dogma, and social arrangements that block human flourishing — all of which it treats as repairable.

The break is political and moral together: institutions that fail to treat persons as free and equal, and the human urge — in rulers and neighbors alike — to force one's own idea of the good on others. Kant's line that nothing straight was ever made from the crooked timber of humanity is the tradition's sober note.

The break is social, not spiritual: sexism as a learned way of thinking that women and men alike absorb from childhood, embedded in institutions from the family to the state — hooks stresses that women too can hold sexist beliefs.

A social and political break: the borders of states do not match the communities people actually belong to, so millions live under governments not their own. Gellner defined nationalism precisely as the demand that the political unit and the national unit coincide; moderns like Tamir add the loneliness of people stripped of communal roots.