A venomous tool of religion is the confounding concept of sin. By definition, sin is a transgression against God or his will. But it has a lot more baggage than that.
Christianity uses sin to control people. Sin causes people to feel fear, guilt and shame. It strangles the (metaphoric) soul and prevents a person from reaching their true potential.
Faced with committing a sin, even accidentally, a person feels anxiety, fear and guilt. Having sinned, shame is added into the mix as well as a new fear of judgement by the
righteous (I will cover the bullying nature of righteousness in another post), fear of condemnation to hell and the shame of being found out.
It rots to the core and has caused grief to untold billions throughout history. Sin and hell is inculcated to vulnerable children at their preacher's feet and on their mother's knee. The mental and emotional abuse continues through the ages. The saddest thing is that the people who are meant to love and nurture these children are ignorant of the damage they are doing.
The baffling book of Genesis shows us how sin came into the world. It was via God.
God created the paradise of Eden for Adam (and later Eve) and placed two trees in it. Adam was promised death if he ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and eating from the Tree of Life would grant eternal life. Eve was not granted the same warning.
Surely such a dangerous tree would be kept out of reach. In fact, why create such a damnable tree in the first place? (Mental note, don't let God near the kids lest he puts them in the bath next to a running toaster!)
Adam inexplicably bypassed the Tree of Life and went about his business in the garden (probably trying to remember the names of the tens-of-millions of animal species he named the other day).
With his ominscience, God knew what would happen. God had set Adam up to fail. There are many adjectives that can be used to describe this behaviour and none of them are positive.
We all know that a talking serpent (a species that has obviously become extinct) urged Eve to eat the fruit. And Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge at her behest and some 900 years later he received his promised punishment of death. Sin and shame had entered the world through God's entrapment. Glory!
God then goes on to shoot the messenger by cursing the serpent to slither on its belly and eat dust forevermore.
On top of that, Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden and given The Curse. Not satisfied with punishing Adam and Eve for the heinous crime of eating some fruit, he passed the curse on to every single person who has ever lived. The Original or Ancestral Sin had arrived and every person born is subject to it.
I think that God is quite petty for the arbitrary things that are considered sins. For example:
- Eating a piece of fruit from a prominent and enticing tree;
- Wearing clothes woven of two different fabrics;
- Eating shellfish;
- Planting two kinds of seed in your field;
- Suffering a witch to live; etc.
God needs to toughen up if these thing affront him.
I'm not saying that there isn't wrong and right. But sin is a social contrivance designed to bring suffering to the masses. Once infected, you must cleanse yourself according to the direction on the box of your religion. The Catholics have the arrogance to allow priests to absolve sins, meaning you must come back each week to confess.
I refuse to subscribe to the concept of sin. I will also be raising my children to not believe in the specious concept so they can grow to be well-adjusted, moral and fearless members of the human race.
I sit here in my poly-cotton shirt contemplating my dinner of prawns marinated with chilli and garlic picked from my garden, I feel no shame, grief, fear or anxiety. Life is good and I don't intend to let God get in the way of that.
