Old Testament Exodus 20:17
New Testament Matthew 5:17-19
Matthew 5:21-22
Poor Skald the Rhymer! Pure evil, eternally damned and doomed!
Could we go outside of Christian denominations?
Years ago I was in Bodh Gaya, India and had a conversation with a Buddhist priest about this subject.
He told me that there was nothing wrong with such thoughts and that they should be treated as rain hitting the feathers on the back of a duck. Just let them wash away from your mind. *Acting *on such thoughts is wrong, but there wasn’t anything one could do to prevent this kind of thought from entering one’s mind. With practice, he assured me, "washing away"such thoughts becomes second nature.
I seem to have the picture, from what I’ve read / heard said, that there is fairly close equivalence between Christian ideas on this issue, and Mangosteen’s cited Buddhist same. The relatively “sane” Christian position, as I understand it, is that a Christian can’t help sinful thoughts coming into their mind: the sin is to deliberately entertain them and dwell on them – rather than to do utmost to banish them, in favour of thinking about good stuff.
Look, I really, really try my hardest. Honestly I do my very, very best but…try as I may I can barely push my sinful thoughts above 1 per waking minute.
I’m a failure I know
I’m not sure this is Jesus’s main point, but one thing I get from these verses is, don’t think you’re a Good Person just because you’ve never committed murder or adultery. You’re not a better person at heart than an actual adulterer or murderer if the difference between you is, not that you lack the evil intentions, but that you lack the courage or the opportunity to act on them.
There’s also the fact that the thoughts we choose to habitually entertain can and do affect our attitudes and actions.
One way of thinking of sin is of missing the mark, or failing to live up to being the kind of person we should be. I don’t know about you, but that’s something I do all too often.
Another way to look at it is that the basic problem is the condition of sin, of which individual sins are symptoms. Expecting to get through the day without committing a few sins would be like a sick person expecting to get through the day without coughing or sneezing.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but then, neither is the analogy of sin as breaking the laws in a criminal code.
This is pretty much how I see it. You might as well be praying “Dear Lord, forgive me for not being Jesus. Amen.”
It’s like all those countless building and fire codes. The system’s set up where you can’t help but violate some, and that way they’re sure to have you by the balls whenever they want to.
That’s pretty close, actually. Not so much “forgive me for not being Jesus” as “forgive me for not being like Jesus”. That is, after all, the only real goal for a Christian.
But the goal is not real, and that’s the point I’m trying to get across-the game is rigged, and you can’t win.
Lutherans (ELCA) are either more strict than Catholics ------ or much less. It depends on your viewpoint. From our perspective, anything humans do has a certain level of possible sin attached due to our nature and the stain of Original Sin. In a manner of speaking, its built into our free will and we can lessen it but not totally avoid it. We don’t stress “thought” the way the RC church does but they do accept a level of avoidance we don’t.
As a 12 year old boy going through puberty I really struggled with this. I stopped going to church, problem solved.
I think the concept of sinful thinking is widespread. I am also thinking religion is becomming more tolerant in general regarding thought issues.
Slight nitpick but it says ’ to look at with lust’ which seems a step removed from simple thought.
:rolleyes: If you only knew what I was thinking about your daughter or your wife. Not personally, of course. These rules make perfect sense in societies that want to lessen violence…especially before the inventions of a police force and the telephone.
Don’t work on long-term averages, but specialize in the “sprint.” It’s quite possible to have sixty sinful thoughts in a single minute.
More to the point, in societies that haven’t invented individual human moral agency, and the ideal of liberty. Tribal societies are collectivist, beyond anything Stalin could have dreamed of.
We’re talking about the kind of society that would kill a man by stoning…for picking up firewood on Saturday. Their goal isn’t lessening violence: their goal is absolute control of every phase of tribal life, both public and private.
Is thinking about having an orgy with a room filled with 60 people one sinful thought, or 60?
What do you mean? What’s winning? What’s losing? *There’s no score being kept. *
It’s like being in a marriage: my wife and I let each other down in various little ways on a regular basis, and there’s no way we’ll ever get to a place where it never happens But we’re not keeping score. Winning is that we love each other. Losing would be if our relationship fell apart.
Same with God. Winning is that God loves me, and is present in my life. Losing would be if I blocked him out, which I can do by being dishonest with him and myself about who and what I am. He can’t help me if I don’t open to him the parts of me that need healing.
It is silly to think in terms of how many sins, by the way. Sin just is. Infinity + 1 = infinity.
If there was a god and he loved me, he wouldn’t have come up with this “Sins of the father/Original Sin” crap to begin with. That’s what I mean by a stacked deck.