What Sin Is

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  

I suppose there is nothing more certain in this world than the proposition that "all have sinned."  

The rest of the phrase, "and fallen short of the glory of God" is no less true if you are a person of faith, but it is not a proposition agreeable to all people.

I doubt if there is anyone who is willing to say, “God does not exist,” who would never say, “Sin does not exist.”  

They might discount some of the theological explanations about sin, for example, original sin, but after just a few minutes of watching the news, we can all agree there is something terribly wrong with people.

Not just the news too--look at history.

I often laugh when I hear preachers talk about the good old days when our country was a righteous nation, when we had prayer in the schools, and Bible in the schools, and Mayberry RFD flourished ubiquitously throughout the land. 

Of course, a lot of preachers suffer the damnations of selective memory.  Back when we had prayer in some schools, we had black folks in their place and white folks in their place. Americans were hanging other Americans like "strange fruit" from trees.  Women were dying from back alley abortions.  Gangs were blowing each other away on Valentines Day.  Scientists were inventing the atom bomb.

There was child abuse, wife beatings, destruction of property, political corruption, corporate greed…you know…the real America lived by real Americans.

On the other side of the planet, one of the most Christian nations on Earth was rounding up Jewish people into ghettos and then systematically sending them off to die in death camps.  

How many per day?  Was it 23,000 people murdered per day?  I heard that number in the movie Conspiracy.

If only Andy Taylor had been the chancellor of Germany…

Indeed, you can always count on the Nazis to help us make a great argument about the reality of sin.

Now, we have Syria.  We’ll always have the Middle East, it seems.

Sin does not always have to be violent.  Today, our government has been shut down by a few extreme conservatives who despise the thought that 25 million people might have healthcare in this country.  What would Andy Taylor do about that?

I sincerely believe many of these great despisers hate other people with that old hatred that has been around since 19 "Negroe Slaves" were part of the cargo of ship that arrived in the Virginia Colony circa 1600s.  

These despisers hatred, however thinned out the line of it is reaching back into the distant past, is tied to our president.

For so much hate, it would be right to say they judge him by the content of his skin...at least the historical content and not by the splendid colors of his character.

Indeed, sin is as old as homo erectus who being so like us in physically must have sinned like us in violently.  

Sin has been around since that first time a homo sapiens imagined what it would be like to bludgeon his brother to death...and then smashed his skull.

Sin never leaves us.  It is the animal within us, the flesh ripping fangs and teeth of our most primitive selves.  It drives that special ingenuity of our species, the badge of our evolution, which is our great intelligence that crafts, builds, imagines, and explores.  

Sin marks everything we touch.  Behold the beasts we were and the beasts we have become.  Homo sapiens devised tools to feed; now we engineer technologies that murder all too well.  

I believe we have not evolved from apes, but we are yet apes endowed with the evolution of reason.  We carry within our nature the intelligence to save ourselves and the iniquity to eradicate all the flora, fauna, and people that ever existed.  

I remember Campus Crusade for Christ staff members, and their literature, made a big deal out of sin.  They argued that God must exist since sin is so certain.

Well, they were right about one thing.  All of us can agree that the evidence for sin is so overwhelming that to deny it would be as delusional, according to atheists, as people who believe in God.

I heard the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor say that the word "sin" exists because it points to something in the world that happens.

Indeed.

Blessings...