Sin.

Great Debates
1

As a former Catholic, (SO former, I had to spellcheck it), I know how sin, or redemption from sin, is stressed.
I’m interested in how you feel about the concept of sin.
Catholicism stresses sin.
Man, I am NOT about that. I can’t even comprehend the obsession.
Hell, I remember, as a kid, trying to come up with enough ‘sins’ for confession.
“I lied to my Mother. I was mean to my sister. I was too loud in class”… all acceptable ‘SINS’… a few Hail Mary’s, and all was good.

I think I’m gonna be one of the folks who is willing to fight to defend Atheism.
Or, rather, someone who will not defend ignorance.

CRINZ

2

now, by the concept of sin, do you mean the catholic notion of sin, that is, a certain offense pardonable by a certain ritual?

When I speak of sin in religious debates, I usually use the term loosely, that is a “sin” is a moral evil.
I suppose technically you’re referring to those particular “sins” listed in the bible, and the supposed consequences thereof, barring particular forgiveness. To that, I say hogwash. I’m of the opinion that God, if he exists, probably doesn’t judge us based on if we said enough hail mary’s after lying, but rather on our life as a finished product: did we live successfully, not bring suffering to our fellow man, use the advantages God gave us. Not: hey did you follow the tenets I set forth in obscure text that was mistranslated several times?

So the catholic and probably general christian conception of sin, no. The possibility of moral evil, yes.

3

I tend to think of sin in two ways.

Sin in the religious sense as a “crime against God”, which is morally neutral; it’s not wrong, it may very well be right; it’s just against the will of God.

Sin in the psychological sense, which is doing something you believe to be wrong; giving into temptation, as it were.

4

The way I see it is that we placed in a war between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. We are in a place where we can go with either, and often do. Sin is going against the Kingdom of God (or with the Kingdom of Satan), so sinning places us as a enemy of God’s Kingdom, and a servant of the enemy. In my view God is OK (but saddened) with your choice of what kingdom you wish to serve in and you are allowed to join the enemy’s forces, fight for Satan’s side, and if you stay there, share in his fate.

Repentance for sin, again as I see it, is to surrender to the Kingdom of God, which means you will now be fighting on God’s side, and be given redemption for your former sins as promised.

5

What about doing something that actually is wrong? Assuming there is an objective right and wrong.

Giving in to temptation isn’t a sin unless the thing you’re tempted to do is, itself, sinful—in which case the definition is circular. You can be tempted to have another piece of pie, but eating pie isn’t a sin. As any mathematician can tell you, sin π = 0.
One way I can think of to look at it is that sin is a state of spiritual ill health. Sin is to your spiritual condition as sickness is to your physical condition. Your soul is out of tune. You’re at odds with God, or your Higher Power, or the harmony of the universe, or whatever. You don’t have to be religious to have a concept of spiritual health and sinfulness, but if you are, you’re going to think of it in terms of your religious beliefs.

Sins, then, are specific acts (of comission or omission) that endanger the health of your soul, often by harming other people and/or by coming between you and God/the universe/whatever.

6

crinz, ya gotta make your thread titles more descriptive. I read this one as being in the imperative voice and I went right out and . . . well, never mind.

7

Sin? I don’t buy it, and I’m one of the more religious people I know. Of course, I’m a very agnostic religious person, so that might have something to do with it.

I have varying levels of disagreement with different definitions and concepts of sin:

a certain offense pardonable by a certain ritual. I can agree with that,* if *we admit that the one doing the pardoning is the person who feels he has “sinned” and the people around him who will treat him differently as a consequence of him going through some trial and proving he’s really, really sorry and won’t do it again. But I think the rituals of today are too slight to be effective. 1000 years ago, when the act of contrition was substantial and public - a king who only ate bread and water for six months to demonstrate his sincere regret for his wrongdoings, for example - I think it might have been useful. Or if the act of contrition relates to the sin committed: steal something? Your act of contrition is to work at the store you stole from for no actual pay, for twice the hours it would cost at minimum wage to pay for what you stole. Those make sense to me, and allow both the guilty and those around him to forgive him. A few mumbled prayers? Bullocks. Too easy. Too many people will either sin again because the payment is so slight (no penitence) or still wander around feeling guilty because they haven’t paid enough for what they did.

I agree with enigm4tic: God is probably more concerned with how you live your life after your sin, not how you obtained your Get Out of Hell free card.

“a crime against God”: what does that even MEAN? Last I knew, God/dess/es were incorporeal, so how do you sin against them? You can do wrong to people and plants and animals and buildings, but then you need to make reparations to whomever or whatever you’ve harmed. Last I knew, God/ess/es were also fairly silent or fed conflicting messages through prophets, so how do we even know what the will of God is/are? Is this the bashing-babies-against-stones God or the turn-the-other-cheek God or the rip-hearts-out-in-sacrifice God or the let-blood-fill-the-public-square God or the don’t-kill-anything-not-even-a-bug God? No matter what I do, I’m going against the will of Somebody!

I guess I mostly agree with Thudlow Boink. The closest I can come to a concept of sin is being out of tune with one’s higher self, one’s spiritual growth, the universe, the great cosmic orgy that is life. I feel it, quite literally, as a dissonant note deep inside me that’s as irritating as a mosquito buzz on a hot August night. That’s my warning bell that maybe I’m spending too much time on the Dope, or too much time smoking dope, or “forgetting” to do my spiritual exercises that make me feel so good when I do them. Those, to me, are “sins”. They’re things that are tempting me away from the expansion and growth I feel when I’m doing what I have promised myself I’d do - get to know the universe a little better.

What I DON’T believe, most emphatically, is that we are all natural sinners and deserve eternal torment for it. I don’t believe babies and small children are capable of sin, or even of moral wrongdoing. I’m studying hermetic philosophy right now, and I’m struggling with the Kabbalistic idea of The Fall, as it’s just so sticky gunky grossly covered with Judeo-Christian guilt, despite my teachers’ assurances that “it’s not like that really, wait until you know more and you’ll feel better about the whole thing.” Ugh.

8

Do you feel, then, that those who have no sense of right and wrong, or whose sense is fatally antisocial, are too mentally ill to sin?

9

I feel that sin is a personal thing–something you feel when you’ve gone against what you know is right. Therefore, people can do really heinous things without it being a “sin” if their actions don’t violate their own moral code. People with no moral code at all, assuming such a thing exists, would then be incapable of sin. I catch a lot of flak, especially from religious people, because I don’t believe in an outwardly imposed sense of wrongdoing–I don’t accept guilt or shame simply because somebody else thinks I’ve done wrong. It’s only when I’ve done wrong, according to my own moral compass, that I feel shame or guilt. Since I work very hard not to break my own rules, I don’t experience the feeling of sinning very often–I also don’t like the feeling of being wrong, which is why I try to get my facts straight before opening my big mouth. I sometimes feel a bit envious of those who have accepted an outwardly imposed moral code, because to my mind it means they can get off the hook way more easily than I can, and it also seems to me they can go ahead and break the rules because they know they can do their penance and feel very very bad about it and it’s all hunky dory. Since I’m the only one who can get myself off the hook and I don’t have a “sin table” with defined penalties for various infractions I don’t know until something happens how much it’s going to bother me or how far I’ll have to go to make it right–simpler just to toe the line in most cases.

The bumper sticker that enrages me like no other is “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven!” What a cop out, what a smug little slap in the face, it’s like “oh, I can do anything I want no matter how appalling, because I’ll just say I’m sorry to Jesus and it’ll all be fine!” What kind of morality is that, anyway? Christians ought to bring back predestination, that’d keep 'em in line!

10

We had a long Pit thread a while back about this very bumper sticker, with a lot of people attacking it and a lot of other people defending it. Apparently there are numerous ways it can be interpreted, some offensive, some not.

11

I wonder if the OP isn’t asking about the definition/personal view of sin, as he (?) is asking about it as an instrument of moral and social development, specifically in the Catholic Church, where the concept is especially stressed.

This, to me, is a far more interesting question: Why is sin important to anyone other than the sinner? There are two common, easy answers: (1 - the strictly religious viewpoint) Identifying sin is a moral obligation to your fellow man, since you should want everyone to enjoy better communion with God, and sin is an impediment to that. (2 - the strictly atheist viewpoint) it is a means to exert control over the group, guarantee followers’ allegiance to the current authority structure, and preserve the “goodies” of the church for the elite.

I don’t think either of these opinions tell the whole story–and there is likely one I’m overlooking–but I agree with the OP: The Catholic Church makes a bigger deal about sin (confession of sins to a priest, theological abstractions) than can be attributed to simple concern for your fellow man. Yet I think the spark of this interest in sin is that self-same concern for others. Any opinions (this is GD; why should I even ask? :slight_smile: )?

12

As the most secular person I know, there are a few words that I just don’t use because of all the religious baggage. Words like “faith,” “soul,” “spiritual,” and “sin.”

Oh sure, I can use the words in a metaphorical sense, like “That child has a beautiful soul.” or “Isn’t it a sin what that woman has done with her hair.”

But literally, I avoid these words like the plague.

13

Unless you’re a believer, the word is meaningless except in the way **panache45 ** mentions.

14

It’s my understanding that a ‘sin’ is defined as ‘an act that breaks a rule set by god’. It’s the analogue of the word ‘crime’ as that word relates to a given legal system. Absent a specific legal system, there is no crime; absent God, there is no sin. Also, everyone is going to apply the term slightly differently depending on which version of God and his laws they believe in, or are speaking in the context of.

I second Der Trihs’s opinion that the concept of sin is morally neutral; it only mirrors absolute morality (if such exists) to the extent that God’s laws mirror absolute morality. One supposes, for example, that the sin of breaking the sabbath is morally neutral; that does not prevent it being a sin, by definition.

Because God is the one handing out punishments for sins, it is entirely reasonable that he could offer a handful of Hail Mary’s as an alternative option to eternal damnation. As the ultimate authority, he may set up any rules he likes for the punishment of offenders. And, while the Hail Mary’s do seem rather underwhelming as punishment, it’s no less sensible than those who believe that accepting christ with no other effort is all it takes. It does convey a rather arbitrary nature to the entire sin/forgiveness system, but then the meeting of various sins with the blanket punishment of eternal hellfire is somewhat arbitrary as well.

Sin can only reflect a corruption of the soul to the extent that God’s laws reflect morality, which clearly isn’t 100%. It’s probably not 0% either, though, so there is some basis to the notion of sin as a measure of person corruption; unfortunately the fact that not all sin is corruptive implies that this perspective is not generally correct.

The notion that sin or any other thing defines you as being either on the side of God or on the side of Satan is palpably incorrect; it fails under the fallacy of the excluded middle. One can reject both God and Satan. The notion also lends itself so strongly to the demonization of one’s fellow man that the very thought of it grates on and repells every moral fiber of my soul. If there actually is a God with such a blindered and hopelessly paranoid perspective, he is not, in my mind, worthy of toleration, much less worship.

15

This is my understanding of what the point of the Adam and Eve story is supposed to be. It wasn’t wrong, per se, to eat the apple, the sin was disobedience to God.

Which goes against my philosophy of life in key way: I don’t believe in the idea of things being wrong because they are against the law, but believe it should work the opposite way: things should be against the law because they are wrong.

16

Not speaking for Der Trihs, but that’s pretty much how I feel. Consider this concurrent thread in which (to my mind) the key issue raised is pretty much the same. To similar effect, see Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

17

Yeah, it’s not about simply concern for your fellow man, but concern for your relationship with God. That’s huge. It’s like you’ve done something to offend your absolutely best friend, someone you couldn’t imagine living without. Of course you want to apologize and make up for it. Ultimately I want to love God and do His will, and concern for my fellow man follows from that.