The One About Sin
Monotheistic religions play an important role in our society. They inform many of our behavioral and relational standards, even for those that stand outside them. Balanced against other institutions, they have traditionally been important in the creation of alternatives to other, less refined models for shaping loyalty and cooperation (eg. blood feuds and xenophobic tribalism). Religions form around the notion of a higher power, who through some artifice or another, oversees the flourishing of individuals and groups. In most cases, this thing is personally engaged in the lives of its subjects, doling out rewards and punishments in accordance with certain presumptions.
For the most part, these are innocuous enough. The Ten Commandments recommend against murder, theft, and graft, even if the bits about honoring other gods might seem weirdly insecure for the One True God. The Five Precepts of Buddhism are, in essence, the same as the more useful commandments, but then the Buddhists escape the trap of believing in an actual sky person who’s perpetually worried you might be talking behind His back. Dharmic religions are a bit of a mixed bag, but most westerners stay focused on a pretty narrow range of traditions that end run around their worst elements by recommending passivity.
This is because it’s easier for the outsider to see what they want to. Westerners cherry pick: they prefer their yoga without the attendant caste system.
Trauma and Faith
But it would seem the world is moving on. While christian Evangelicals might not go door to door in my neighborhood anymore, I still see them on the streets, handing out pamphlets and promising salvation to the credulous. I don’t imagine this is a very effective approach. These days much of their audience is homeless; people who are made to sit through lectures and occasionally pretend conversions in order to access assistance (my city, like many, is experiencing a serious housing crisis). After all, these confessions have been with us long enough that it’s hard to find many poor, deluded fools thinking that their “good news” is in any way “new news”.
Complicating this is the fact that most major faiths are focused on some type of millenarian, apocalyptic vision of the future. Unfortunately for them, the end of the world has repeatedly failed to manifest, crippling the value of their prophecies and limiting their ability to seize their destiny. When you think the end is just around the corner, it’s hard to get worked up about one’s long term goals. That said, we’re all still here, and most major religions continue profiting off our discomfort with that. If you can’t get what you want, maybe you can profit off the people who don’t know any better?
Regardless, I’ve generally restrained the urge to counter-evangelize when I see these people. Mormons especially: I’ve yet to meet a Mormon (former of otherwise) that hadn’t been turned into at least a bit of a traumatized mess owing to their time in the church. I always want to know more about why they would want to inflict that on others. But I suppose it’s as simple as this: we visit our traumas on our children because, too often, we’re try to recreate ourselves in them. Especially the ugly bits. That said, it’s hard to find a good way to ask a parent or a pastor if they know they’re ruining lives through their adherence to corrupted dogmas. People are weirdly sensitive about their eternal truths.
I’ve been accused of being a jerk in this regard. After all, part of me has enjoys revealing the weaknesses inherent to dogmatic religiosity. But I justify the behavior because perhaps the worst thing about being religious is what it does to your moral compass. How many important religious leaders have explained how, without their god threatening to torment them, they would happily fall into acts of rape and murder? Not to mention the people who have committed their every waking act to the dream of heaven. What replaces that hope when the universe turns out to be so vast; so empty? When the death they have so long sought out promises nothing? That they have wasted their lives in the vain pursuit of a happiness through death? Endless promise ruins lives.
In any case, it’d be heartbreaking.
And, as such, deprogramming that should be taken with the gravity it deserves. And that occasionally requires a little tough love.
Troubled Beginnings
See, the Christian system is built on the promise of eternal life — specifically paradise. Believe the right things, earn an eternal reward. Jesus spent most of his career wandering around and telling people that if they just loved Him enough, they could get into heaven and hang out forever with Him and His (real) Dad. By all accounts, Jesus wasn’t a bad guy, he was just a super charming narcissist. After all, his daddy issues were pronounced enough that, at some point in His life, he denied his father Joseph in favor of His absentee sky god. But then, Narcissistic Personality Disorder has always been with the human species. Like most of these things, it’s probably been following us around since before we were properly human. Hell, it might even be the default setting.
And Jesus tried to paint a compelling picture of what the afterlife might look like, not to mention how to get there. There’s no sense in nitpicking any of it, though. He was probably just looking to fill the place up with people that He would enjoy being around. But until the death of Jesus, the movement that would ultimately spawn the Christian faith could be little more than a small regional cult. It took the work of those evangelicals (what today we might call propagandists) to really get the machinery of faith pumping. Exile helps; so does having a message that you’re not entirely responsible for.
After all, the Evangelicals’ is a naturally hysterical (maybe perverted…the difference is subtle) position. They don’t choose, they simply carry. They suborn their personalities to the projection of the Son of God they conjure out of their own insecurities. But pretending to be someone else, like any self-respecting cosplayer can tell you, is empowering. You can turn your insecurities over to a character, even (maybe especially) if it is doomed to be torn apart by lions. And so they did. Wandering the near east, preaching the gospel of a man we cannot say for sure they’d ever actually met. But whatever they did, it worked. Christianity caught on, at least in Europe, displacing rival confessions and even helping to inspire the creation of Islam for good measure.
As it evolved, the tribal monotheism of the Christians twisted around its origins and into something more universal. Remember that the Jewish religion from which Christianity derived was really more of a nationalist cult — according to the Bible, God, known as Jahweh by the Jews of the time, looked on the Jews with a special favor. He was a tribal god given airs by a primitive and violent people, whose claims to superiority were built on the straw men made of His rivals.
And these origins still inspire the legacy of vile tribalism that plagues Christian Nationalism, its most important modern variant. The foundation of most Christian Nationalisms can be found in the stories passed on about the Jews and their special relationship to God. Nationalists just think that Americans (or whatever) are a suitable stand-in. But this is instinctual: gods have long served as the representative spirit of different peoples and places. In this way, one might say that the gods taught us how to be human. Through the practices of the faithful, religion functions to help shape agency within communities — an essential thing in a world where resources are scarce and nature capricious. To make the claim that one’s tribal religion is universal is really just a tool for conquest and genocide. An incredibly efficacious one, as evidenced by the conquering histories of most major faiths.
The Wages of Sin
And so today, Christianity is one of the most important faiths on the planet. While its greatest scholars have (mostly) stopped arguing about the metaphysics of angels, they still bang on to an uncomfortable degree about how best to destroy rival confessions; mentioning “the gays” or the spiritual role of women in a room full of the right ones is still a fun way to promote schisms (several major orders have recently gone through crackups on issues of race, sex, and how being on the wrong side of these things can keep you out of Jesus’ special club). They obsess over the question of sin, which they largely equate with sex, attraction, and their attendant jealousies.
And this is probably why, while Baptists, Catholics, and Mormons might offer different views of Jesus’ true message, the abuses their institutions distribute feel awfully similar. The reason for this has something to do with the wages of sin and the structure of taboo. And probably masturbation.
While the Bible doesn’t actually have a whole lot to say on the subject of sex acts, the early church quickly moved to impose a range of restrictions around them. In many Christian households the subject is little discussed, as many hold that sin exists simply through the act of knowing — such is the base lesson of Eve and the apple. God is jealous, and (apparently) nothing can quite put Him out of mind like a really solid lay. And so the most zealous believers have always celebrated celibacy as a means of ducking distraction.
Which is why things get ssticky so fast. According to tradition, to sin is to act against the wishes of God. In order to avoid it, one must know what He wants. While the specific dictates might be as crazed as the nonsense that fills up religious histories, most of us don’t feel competent to sort them out on our own. This the role of priests, that class of leadership whose job it is to project on their flocks their profound (generally sexual) insecurities on their flock — young people especially. If that’s not a recipe for abuse, I don’t know what is.
And yet, even I find the word “sin” to be useful. The broader claim that some things go against the natural order contains an element of truth. After all, human beings are social creatures, and to deny the repercussions of that fact that is a kind of sin. I also believe that it’s a sin to strive for immortality — we are meant to die, and no one I’ve ever met who wants to live forever should be, under any circumstances, actually be allowed to do so. Should Elon Musk ever figure out how to make himself permanent, our future will depend on destroying him.
But this isn’t how most religious people understand things. Their faith dictates their options; reason falls away in the face of proscribed realities. And this is where we find the wages of sin — the terrible things we do, when what we believe is out of alignment with reality; natures way of accounting for the unintended consequences of our acts. What God wants, what constitutes the natural order, is a projection of priests and the history of their insecurities and entitlements.
Thus understanding sexual repression is central to understand the corruption at the heart of the Christian faith. By denying sexuality as a basic driving characteristic of the the human animal, Christianity has committed a grave sin. Like most faiths, Christianity doesn’t have the language to bring its adherents up and into healthy alignment with their sexuality (the consequences of which are writ in large, capital letters across our contemporary political discourse). Sex scandals emerge because organization that stand against sexuality are required to create a labyrinth of institutional rules and regulations to keep it from surfacing. And as many an enemy of such things has pointed out, that which is oppressed still has a way of showing up, albeit as a twisted version of itself. This is why catholic preists traditionally got off light for abuse. As an institution, the Church knows that celibacy is an unreasonable imposition. And the priesthood, ignorant of the most basic machinery of consciousness, only knows that its system doesn’t quite work in practice. It’s hard to honor boundaries we’re barred from understanding. This doesn’t quite absolve them, but it at least allows a context.
Alternatively, consider the challenges raised by climate change. The people most vociferously opposed to addressing the climate crisis are frequently deeply religious. They believe that no amount of human intervention can affect what God has wrought. This is another one of those things I would call a sin, the wages of which threaten the viability of our biosphere. By means of their activist ignorance they hope to burn the world away. And because they think the immortality of the soul matters more than the delicacy of the body, they might not care anyways. Another sin — thinking they get to live forever. Do they deny man’s power over his environment because they think it impossible, because they seek to hasten the end, or because they’ve chosen to ignore the lessons of Genesis?
But the point of God was always to evade the natural order and to dodge our place in it. And why not? Life is hard and fantasy will always play a role in our capacity to disassociate from it. This is how Jedi becomes an official religion. And yes, I’ve encountered victims of abuse among them as well.
Whither Goodness?
I don’t know if what I would term “goodness” is actually possible for people who genuinely believe in God. I think it can be approximated, and I think that a lot of good can be accomplished through the medium of faith. Again, most shelters I know are run by religious groups, and I do applaud them for it. But I also wonder how many of, say, my city’s homeless population isn’t there in the first place because parents chose their idea of Jesus over the realities of their children. How much division and strife has come to define communities owing to the superficial differences between confessions? How much snake oil, intellectual and otherwise, has been foisted on poor, unsuspecting fools who were never allowed to think outside a vanishingly tiny box?
I like to tell my religious friends that, while I may not believe in God (I don’t see how It’s contingent), I do believe in us. By this, I mean to suggest that, in a world without higher powers, man must become his own best example. How we do that speaks to the value of philosophy and biography — who are your heroes and why? Does their example make for a better world or a more impoverished one? What are the most useful lessons your fellow humans can offer you? The example of Jesus can serve here as both guide and warning — while his kindness was legendary, the fact that he hid behind God left an unfortunate legacy of misapprehended agency. You can’t really take Jesus’s word for it: he was only speaking for someone else. Since we don’t all get to be the son of God, how can we ever hope to be better? Islam raises this point, but ultimately makes the same mistake by attributing so much of what is good and right through the person of the Prophet. Religion, it seems, only strives to make slaves of its adherents by lashing them to a series of meaningless arguments about fictionalized personalities.
This becomes tricky because people attain accolades in any number of ways, largely based upon context and culture. Plutarch’s Lives, for example, **is full of murderous, xenophobic assholes. There is no way for a decent person to read the biographies of Jefferson or Trump without shivering with righteous rage. And yet these men are heroes to millions — jealous, broken millions who, as victims themselves (usually at the hands of men who resemble these corrupted heroes), have come to admire duplicity and the virtues of a sheltered ignorance.
But the question of how we create a sense of justice and order in a universe which is lacking both is an important one. As such, the notion of sin as emerging from the unsustainable is perhaps useful: if what you’re doing cannot hold in the long term, or if it creates unnecessary suffering for yourself and your fellows, it might be a sin. And you might consider the possibilities offered by repentance. No doubt your children will thank you.
