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
