Saturday, February 18, 2012

Andrew on "What Is Sin?"




What Is Sin?

Anyone who has spent anything more than a few minutes involved in Armstrongism knows what sin is. All twenty-seven definitions. I jest. Slightly. It’s the transgression of the law, the missing of the mark, and all those wrong thoughts that are “broadcast” telepathically directly into your brain all 43,200 seconds of the day by the Prince of the Power of the Air, a.k.a. Satan.

In secular terms, a “sin” would just be a mistake, an error in judgment, or a grasping and fumbling in unfamiliar and confusing circumstances. But as soon as you wrap it up in religious terms and propose that every embarrassing thing you’ve ever done has been chiseled into eternal stone to be used against you in the most intimidating circumstance imaginable to determine your eternal fate, well then every thought, intention, and act, necessarily becomes fraught with eternal significance.

We’re not really going to argue things like murder, rape, grand theft, etc. There isn’t anyone who doesn’t agree that these are serious offenses that one cannot generally do “accidentally.” Probably no one in history has ever uttered the phrase, “Oops, I didn’t mean to become a serial axe murderer.”

“Oh,” we might all say, “that was an understandable mistake. Becoming a serial axe murderer could have happened to anyone.” No, I think we can all agree that does not constitute a valid defense in anyone’s book. Instead, we’re talking about the criminalization of much smaller mistakes.

A key problem with turning every trivial error into an act of cosmic significance is the fact that we are born not really knowing very much, and learning involves making mistakes, and that means doing some “sinning.” Realistically, it just can’t be helped. Yes, it is true, we do have a “choice” in a manner of speaking, whether to sin or not in any given situation, but given tens or hundreds of billions of people, the bible itself says that not one person ever passed the test of living a “crime”-free life.

If the bible is to be believed, on the one hand, God intentionally designed us so weak that every single one of us is going to do some “sinning” every time we try to do anything at all. On the other hand, every mistake and every learning experience has cosmic significance, obviously as an expression of the idea that God doesn’t want us to ever do any “sinning.” Does anyone else see a conflict here? Why would God put us in a no-win scenario like this? Under the burden of so much religious-based accusation and judgment, is it any wonder that so many people suffer from low self-esteem?

Of course, this is a biblical thing, not just an Armstrong thing, so Armstrongism isn’t alone in this. Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam all have their fundamentalism that inflicts the same conundrum upon their followers.

So then, because every single human being ever created is such a heinous criminal (hmm, I wonder why), God’s kingdom would have exactly zero new additions from this earthly experiment except for the enormous and benevolent grace of God, who sent his only begotten Son to die to pay for all our heinous crimes. And we must be eternally grateful and beholden for such a wonderful deed done on my behalf because we are all such heinous criminals.

At the risk of sounding like an absolute heretic, excuse me, but who set this whole system up in the first place, starting with how I was created, and then criminalizing every mistake I was sure to make, thus guaranteeing such an enormous debt of “sin” would be hanging over my, and everyone’s head, that needed paying for in the first place?

The traffic codes are written in the same way. If they were written for safety, then they were written for robot  drivers, not human drivers.  The way the traffic laws are, you can’t help but break some of them every time you drive. They seem calculated to take advantage of human frailty. Any time the city needs some extra income, they can simply go out and fleece the people by issuing a slew of moving violations. Every time you get behind the wheel, you are probably incurring hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of debt (I know I am), which may or may not be demanded of you.

I understand the point of much of the “law” laid out in the bible as a code to genuinely help everyone avoid making some large mistakes, and that’s fine. But what if the whole system of “sin” and “sacrifice” was laid out with the same intentions as the modern traffic laws? What if it’s just the fabrication of a fictitious debt combined with the biggest guilt trip in history for the sole purpose of bringing an entire society under the control of religious authorities?

What if we were to let go of all the neurotic energy bound up in the word “sin”? Not to say that many “sins” aren’t genuinely bad ideas, but just to say, let’s abandon the cosmic significance part of it.

What if we were to say that a mistake is just a mistake? Yes, there will be consequences. You won’t score the brownie point, you might lose the girl, you'll have to pay the fine, or maybe you’ll look like the loser and idiot that we all feel like from time to time. And then a funny thing happens. Everyone forgets. And it’s just not that big of a deal anymore. There’s no cosmic significance. Nobody is going to bring it up a thousand years from now and rake you over the coals for it. And a mistake suddenly becomes something that is affordable. It’s just not that serious. And you can afford to laugh at yourself.

-Andrew

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The next question concerns..."Without the shedding of blood there is NO forgiveness of sins."

Why not? What's blood got to do with it? Is the Deity not big enough to hear, "I'm sorry, I apologize..." and say, "Ok, great, that's fine, I forgive you."

What's with the gore and blood. Made up by men I bet.

M.T. Veins

Anonymous said...

While I remain neutral in mentioning the following, it should be significant that in (at least some parts of) the New Testament, believers have an advocate and when they are forgiven there is no more sin. Period. Forgotten. Never to be brought up again. Until next time.

Anyway, Armstrongism kept reviving Christ from the sacrifice He was going to give so they could go over the sins of the members over and over and over again and again and again. "Have you ##### again?" the minister would ask each time you showed up. It didn't matter if you had just gone through "Passover" services and / or you handn't ever done "#####" since you were baptized: There it was -- a black mark for you to bear forever.

And if you dared bring it up in counseling, you could be sure that it was written up and sent to Headquarters in Pasadena.

Then there were the Manpower Papers where students had their intimate moments discussed and recorded by the ministerial professors, whether said activities actually occurred or not. Just like everything else, ministers had a vivid imagination (not just confined to prophetic speculation) and made stuff up, based on their opinion of the character (or lack thereof) like old biddies at Ladies Aid in a small town of gossips.

Even small things could follow a member from church to church (with the able assistance of ministers who "know these things" -- and their wives) for decades.

So at each "Passover" (which was totally Wrong -- it should be "The Lord's Supper" on the 13th of the 1st month), everyone would do this sick thing and end the service with this horrible song based on Psalm 51.

Meanwhile, many of the ministry did heinous things the members could never imagine doing, such as committing adultery when their wife was dying of cancer. Yes, the members: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! The ministers: Saints!

They were so superior in everything. Why, even to this day, Roderick Meredith maintains he has never committed a "major" sin since his baptism.

Humph!

Likely story.

Forget the Bible.

My beef is with Herbert Armstrong and all his sychophant successors who continue in their anger to this day and continue to fracture the church into smaller and smaller splinters while maintaining their stellar record of being false prophets.

Say? Could being a false prophet be a sin?

Anonymous said...

And now, since this door is opened, I would remind everyone that the Radio Church of God and early glimmerings of the Worldwide Church of God believed in "physical sin".

It is a totally preposterous idea. The ministry should have known better. Christ himself was reported to have quashed the idea saying that the blind man was not blind because of anyone's sin.

Yet this stupidity seems to be returning in some quarters. It is yet another tool to manipulate the remnants from the shallow end of the gene pool who have not yet caught on to the con games of the Armstrongist cults. Perhaps they do not yet know how to use the Internet.

The "physical sin" premise is a terrible idea which caused a lot of people fear, pain and doubt, causing them to believe that everything that happened to them was their fault.

It's no wonder there is so much mental illness in the ACoGs, particularly among the ministry.

DennisCDiehl said...

Maybe "Sin" is not such the boogey man and life ending, eternal damnation thing it is cracked up to be. Perhaps it is just human and the concept of sin arouse from the lack of contact with the Deity humans noticed as time went on and they became more attuned to their own world.

In the Bible we see God being the personal buddy and counselor to Adam and Eve and as the OT goes on and humans become more conscious, God turns into a cloud and a pillar of fire, a voice, a burning bush and then jumps into the major and minor prophets who tell us what the Deity is up to. By the time you get to the end of the OT...you have the Psalms begging God to return and "why are you so far from us..." It was during this time that casting lots, bones, oracles etc were being used to divine the silent God's will.

Somewhere alone the line, priests got the idea that God had disappeared and was "afar off.." because of something the people did. Sin...and if you could cut enough cow throats, burn enough babies or yell loud enough in wailing prayer and repentance, the God would come back. Well...still missing in action for the most part and today we still have our ways of trying so very hard to get back in touch.

Faith was then installed in the churches to keep the faithful feeling it was still their fault. "Faith" is used to bridge the gap between reality and wishful thinking and usually is trumped by the eventual facts.

Andrew said...

Or, basically, Dennis, the same thing that happened to all the other gods in all the other religions.

As our understanding of the universe, both very small and very large has grown, the gods, faeries, ghosts, and elves have all gone away.

John said...

What if it’s just the fabrication of a fictitious debt combined with the biggest guilt trip in history for the sole purpose of bringing an entire society under the control of religious authorities?

And that's the difference between the OT and NT. Under the New Covenant the high priesthood changed from Aaron to Christ and the priests changed from Aaron's family to that of every believer (e.g. Numbers 18:22; Hebrews 4:16; 7:19; 10:22). So why do we even have a full-time priesthood or ministry when it's really not necessary any longer (e.g. 1 John 2:27)? In my understanding we're all "priests" so we all should be able to preach the gospel freely or compile sermons and Bible studies to share with one another our learning. This way we'll all be corrected and refined as we share knowledge rather than learn from one person alone or elitist group who are more focused on their power and influence than your spiritual growth.