Okay, I was perusing this thread when a question popped into my mind.
Why is sex a sin? Why are sin’s sins? In another thread I said that eating pork was probably a sin because, at the time it was written, it could kill you.
Is sex a sin because, if you aren’t married, the potential for hurting another person exists?
I can see why certain things are sins, such as other Gods, murder, and coveting (to a lesser degree), but what about the other sins? The ones that aren’t (IMHO) applicable today?
In my view, sin is not an action, but a decision — specifically, a decision to reject love.
When Jesus walked into Levi’s house, He took His seat among the prostitutes, tax-collectors[sup]1[/sup], and other sinners. He ate and drank with them and told them stories.
But when He walked into the Temple, He became enraged. He turned over tables, beat merchants with a stick, and chased them away, screaming that they were thieves and usurpers.
It seems to me that both the prostitutes and the merchants would have predicted it would be the other way around.
[sup]1[/sup] Tax collectors were mentioned liberally throughout the Gospels to indicate the scum of the earth. I often wonder why literalists don’t believe that tax collecting is a horrible sin.
But in seriousness: if sin is an action or decision born of hatred or rejection of God’s love, why is consensual sex, which is (well, at least most of the time), born of love, potentially sinful?
I’m particularly interested in understanding why “premarital sex” is considered sinful by most Christians. Sure, I can see adultery as sinful as “a breach of Christian contract,” but AFAIK there is no Biblical injunction barring premarital sex. (Most of the explanations I’ve heard involve the injunction in Genesis that “a man should leave his family and cleave to his [wife],” which doesn’t sound very specifically aimed against premarital sex.)
It isn’t. Nowhere does the Christian church teach that merely deciding to have sex is inherently sinful.
Certain types of sexual acts are sinful, but sex itself is not. Unfortunately, many critics prefer to say that the church considers sex itself to be wrong. Strawman arguments, y’know?
No, I’m not saying that Jesus sinned. I’m saying that there is a general misunderstanding about what sin is.
If you define sin as specific actions, you will have to introduce a mitigation to say that Jesus did not sin — both by joining in with the revelers at Levi’s house and by beating the merchants at the Temple.
But in reality, He made the decision to love His neighbors by being a beloved guest in their home and to love His Father by cleansing His house of usurpers.
Sin is born in the heart. It is a decision made there to reject love. Any action that manifests from that decision is sinful.
Suppose a man gives a dollar to a beggar. Has he sinned? How can you judge by his action alone whether he has sinned? You can’t. If he gave the beggar money just to get him out of his life, then the decision that he made in his heart was not to love the beggar, and he therefore sinned. But if he gave the beggar money because he made the decision in his heart that he loved him, then he did not sin.
Saying that certain sexual acts among consenting adults are sinful betrays a myopic comprehension of God’s command. It is impossible to love AND to sin. It is impossible. Impossible.
So, are you saying that any sexual act, done out of love, is not a sin? This would include fellatio? Sodomy?
I’d personally agree with this idea (I don’t think any sexual act can possibly be sinful), but it does seem to go against what many in the church would say. Even JThunder above says that certain sexual acts are sinful… are they even sinful if they are done out of love?
I’m just asking out of curiosity really… I don’t personally buy into the Christian concept of sin, but I’m interested in the answer nonetheless.
Let’s all step back a bit and consider some definitions of terms. Here are some of mine:
A sin is defined by a religious belief, edict or tenet.
In contrast, an illegal act would be defined by a law.
Or a moral code, by a philosophy.
Of course, these can be mixed. Some of the Ten Commandments (but not all), which define sins, are encoded in laws. There is much overlap between the Ten Commandments and many moral codes.
I’ve often felt that a sin is often defined by what someone thinks is wrong, then convinces a religion to concur, automatically making it an edict from a god.
I don’t know how Lib defines “love”, but I think for this to make any sense at all you have to define it as “a sincere and profound desire for the good of others” or something along those lines. Part of that is that an act of love can’t be for the good of a particular individual over the good of others–if someone you love murdered someone, you can’t call murdering the witness to that crime anything but a sin, even if your only reason for acting was out of love for the murderer.
In the same way, any potential sex act has to be evaluated in terms of it’s repercusions on other people–spouses, possibly, and potential children, definitly. If you cannot support a child, risking creating one is not an act of love, whatever emotions you feel in your heart.
In pre-modern societys, widows and orphans were a serious burden: they ate up more resources than they contributed, and in a bad year, every bite they ate was a bite that wasn’t avalible for your own wife and kids. A certain number of widows and orphans were ineveitable, but if there are too many or if hte crop fails, charity dries up and real suffering–the likes of which we are totally seperated from these days–begins. Biblical injunctions on premarital sex functioned to keep the number of widows and orphans at a level that could be supported.
Sex in and of itself is not a sin. Neither one’s sexuality nor one’s sex acts.
What is sinful is the gratification of lust – which, as I’ve pointed out on other threads, is not sexual desire itself, which God deemed as “good” on the sixth day in the Genesis creation myth, but the turning of the subject of sexual desire into a “sex object” for the gratification of one’s own desires, rather than as part of an ongoing and loving relationship. Hence rape is a sin, adultery is a sin because it involves the breaking of a promise regarding one’s sex life, homosexual sodomy was termed a sin in Leviticus because it was practiced solely for self-gratification (and because it was something practiced by them evil Canaanites that the Jews were to keep themselves separate from ), and so on.
Thanks to Victorian primness, most Americans have formed the conception that Christianity teaches that sex is a sin. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
It’s not what you do, it’s why, how, and under what circumstances you do it, that make something a sin. And sex is no different from anything else in this regard.
In my experience, most people who identify themselves as christians seem to embrace this concept also; of sexuality’s inherent sinfulness unless it is within a marriage sanctified by the christian god.
There are probably a lot of Christians who don’t talk about the fact that they are Christian. It is the fundamentalists who are more vocal, I think, and also more likely to see sex as a sin outside of marriage.
Most of the Christians that I know do not believe that sex is sinful in itself.
The church decided that sex was sinful based on the ideas of some groups of people called the Stoics. They believed that pleasure was wrong and life was worthless.
They influenced others, notably Thomas Aquintas into the idea that sex should only be in the missionary position, man-on-top, only days certain days, only with wife, only for procreation and all that good stuff.
Any wants, desires, anything of the sort was lust and lust is bad.
Why is lust bad?
The Calvinists came along in the 1600s and said that lust is bad because it comes from the body. See, the spirit part of you is good and special, but the body part is evil and tries to get you in trouble with God. And soon came Puritans who had a lot of the same ideas and we all know how the story goes.
