we need to rethink ‘sin’

roachpatrol:

roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

been thinking about that one post that went like “forgive me father for i am back on my bullshit” and you know what, that’s a really theologically sound understanding.

like the modern concept of ‘sin’ is so melodramatic, and it’s almost totally wrong. people think of it like a felony conviction, like you gotta Pay and you’re a bad person. but really it’s more like “man quit that shit, it’s not good for you.”

for example, gluttony’s not a sin because some arbitrary metaphysical balance is tipped by it and dumps you into the reject bin. it’s a sin because an unhealthy relationship with food messes up your life and can make things rough on the people around you. back when all the texts got written, scarcity was a big deal, and there was this cultural Thing of overeating so much you had to go puke so you could eat more. nowdays it’s stuff like being such a foodie that you pay outlandish prices for hyped up ingredients, or molding your life around ‘cleanses’ and the latest ‘superfood’. it doesn’t make you evil. you’re not a bad person. it’s just a huge drain on your resources and it distracts you from just living life and being a human being.

but people call anything chocolate ‘sinful’ and then think it’s virtuous and wholesome to restrict their calorie intake until their body screams for mercy, or to insist on the whole foods equivalent of wolf nipple chips because that’s more ‘clean eating’ than the foods the proletariat have access to.

i most of all wish we could get away from labeling anything genuinely sexy as ‘lustful’ and treating healthy sexuality as a bad thing, while not recognizing that the harvey weinsteins of the world are what the sin of lust is actually talking about.

being really into your datemate is not even slightly sinful. referring to attractive people at a club as a ‘catalog’ as if they’re products you can just decide to obtain, that’s where you start heading wrong.

tl;dr: the popular imagination has ‘sin’ completely backwards.

i think that most ‘sins’ are, at the most basic level, pursuing your own self-centered, short-term satisfaction over any larger common good, because that’s what breaks societies down. virtues are just the other way around: altruisitic, long-term work for others, even at an individual’s expense. 

so like, the sin of gluttony: when people in a society are starving and others have so much money and food and toys and land they couldn’t ever even touch all of it in their lifetime but they keep on taking more and more for themselves, that society collapses. temperance, prudence, and charity are all about making sure everyone’s needs are met before any individual pleasures are addressed, and that society does a lot better, less people die. 

lust? if someone only cares about satisfying their own sexual desires, at the expense of everyone else, we all know how badly that goes. wrath? when people act out their anger issues instead of resolving them, you get feuds, mass shootings, wars. pride? vainglory? no one likes having to deal with those shitheads. don’t be those shitheads.  despair? sloth? no one likes hauling the dead weight of people who have given up, either, who wallow around in their pain and helplessness. try to have hope and contribute something to the world. 

like, a society is always going to encourage prosocial behavior and discourage antisocial behavior, because if it doesn’t, that society will dissolve. the seven deadly sins don’t even have to be deadly on a spiritual ‘you’ll burn in hell’ level, they’re disastrous on a very mundane, real-world level too. 

come to think of it, if you’re mindful of being part of a society, of being in some way responsible for other people’s wellbeing, the sins and virtues / dos and donts…. just seem kind of obvious? and making people remember they’re part of a bigger group and have more of a purpose than just individual self- indulgence is basically what organized religion is for. so that’s kind of cool.