Sin, What is it, and is it Anything We Need to be Concerned About?

Originally posted by NewAgeMan

The love of God brings us to repentance..

Our guilt therefore, is a great blessing. Woe to the guiltless who sin without remorse. How happy the guilty who've experienced the grace of forgiveness.

"He who's been forgiven more, loves more."

Love is a morality which trascends the duality of should and shouldn't. So why do we keep eating from the wrong tree?

edit on 8-9-2011 by NewAgeMan because: (no reason given)

Fair enough...although procedurally, that means eventually you get to a point where you do not sin, eschew the blessing, do not get forgiven, and love less?!

Akushla

Originally posted by sageofmonticello
reply to post by jmdewey60

 

I appreciate your taking the time to write a reply to me but I am not very sure how your reply relates to the text of mine that you quoted. Could you please elaborate in that context so I can understand the point of what your reply to me was? Thank you.

Your were talking about being presumptuous.
My answer is that religion got into the habit of assuming the position of the maker of assumptions by being the judge in most cases that would be taken to civil court today in a place like the US. Old habits are hard to break so you still have religionists who feel it is their duty to point out the sins of others.

reply to post by SuperiorEd

When final judgment comes, this debt of mankind will be heaped and piled on the lawless individuals of the world who choose to steak, kill and destroy for profit.
Sin is negative. Serving others and forgiving debt is the opposite of sin. In other words, giving instead of taking.
Jesus walked and suffered every step for us to pay our debt of sin.

This is an Old Testament concept of sin, where you can pay for crimes and transfer guilt onto others.
I don't see the death of sinners as being able to pay for anything.
The bit about Jesus suffering does not fit your hypothesis.

Sin is breaking one of the Lords commandments; deliberately or unwittingly. We must be mindful of how fortunate we are to have a God that is as forgiving and loving as He. As spiritualists, we are saved by the salvation and the blood of Jesus Christ. Once we acknowledge who He is and what his sacrifice represents, we are saved from our own transgressions. Even if we commit them again, we take solace in the fact that He forgives us. Repenting is the only way to cleanse yourself of past transgressions.

"For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Romans 3:23

Even king Solomon, in his great wisdom and discernment, turned his heart from the Lord. What makes this more unfathomable, is he witnessed the presence of the Lord twice! Even the wisest of prophets continue to fall short of his glory. This story should make us ever more vigilant to be wary of sin.

Thus, one should only be concerned about sin if you have yet to find salvation. There was only one man in existence who was perfect and that was Christ Jesus. It's imperative we strive to follow in his perfection, even if we continue to stumble.

reply to post by akushla99

No, I think you become love, where goodness is it's own reward..

In part what I wanted to say is something like

It's good to be good, for goodness' sake (righteousness),

not not to not be bad (think it through).

If this makes you smile, then you "get it" you "grok".

God instills in us right from wrong.

I would take that to mean, a persons conscience. Please explain how that has anything to do with knowing the will of God? Thank you.

In my opinion, God let his will be known in the Bible.
Not everyone is going to agree with this.

And you are right about the conscious thing.

reply to post by GmoS719


I think it's clear from the NT, that God's will is the will to love.

Our problem is rooted in ignorance and a flaw in our thinking ie: mental illness whereby "neurosis is always a substitute for legitamet suffering." (Carl Jung)

I've read that "love is the will to give of one's self for the sake of another's spiritual growth and well being" (M. Scott Peck, MD, in "The Road Less Travelled, a New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth"). At the same time, love is the will to utilize the "tools of discipline" for the sake of our OWN spiritual growth and well being, which are four:

1) Delay of gratification
2) Dedication to truth
3) Acceptance of Responsibility
4) Balancing (emotional bracketing)

In the face of love, happiness and continual growth - who would consciously choose to sin, which amounts to hurting self or another at some level, who's "fruit" is unhappiness.

It's not a should or shouldn't, and those who preach that, are reimprisoning others under the judgement of the law. Heck even if you could be "good" to abstain from sin, who would want to be rewarded only in direct proportion to their works, instead of in accordance with the infinite treasures of Jesus Christ as the embodiment of God's will (love)?

Thus, TRYING to be good in order to escape damnation and the judgement of our sin, also misses the mark, falling short of God's glory, and may therefore be considered a "sin", paradoxically. This is the trap many fall victim to, because it seems to appeal to our human conceptions of justice, when God as the love transcendant had something infinitely better in mind, made manifest in the person and the teaching and Great Work of Jesus Christ.

reply to post by DanteMustDie

Thus, one should only be concerned about sin if you have yet to find salvation.

I don't see how you come to the "thus". And what is it we should be concerned about?

reply to post by NewAgeMan


Hey, I'm not necessarily disagreeing on anything.
But, procedurally, following the examples you used...the snake eats its own tail. (maybe a bad analogy to use).

Sin is a weird concept, especially in terms of organised religion, christianity specifically, and fundamentalism, to be more precise. (in the western parasigm, at least).

Its seems that one gets to the point of 'being saved', and then everybody elses soul is your (not you specifically) concern.

The omnipotent one, created a monster, that has been, is, and will be dealt with...'our' obsession with what this created monster, and the means to which the said monster has, is and will go to to 'tempt' us...kinda sounds like, the psychological need to blame someone else for our own inablity to take responsibility for the 'me' part of y'all.

If you kick someone-it wasn't someone elses fault. If you kill someone-it wasn't someone elses fault. It was yours.

Akushla

reply to post by jmdewey60


Ahhh. I get it now.

Thank you for explaining.

reply to post by GmoS719


Fair enough. I can respect that. My differing opinion is that we have no way of knowing if the Bible has anything to do with God at all so to say that the Bible is the known word of god, to me, is presumptuous.

That is why I say that religion is based on faith, not fact. I am not saying anything is wrong with that, only that if the definition of sin is to defy the known will of god, and that the will of God is to be taken on faith, how can a person "know" the will of god to call something a sin.

I understand your viewpoint though, I just can't find a way to get there for myself. Thanks for the discussion.

reply to post by NewAgeMan

. . .love is the will to utilize the "tools of discipline" for the sake of our OWN spiritual growth and well being,. . .

Where you are going with this is probably OK but I want to jump in here to say something about this word, discipline. There is a movement in various (or all) churches that promote a method of discipline which is basically the dark ages concept that the ascetic monks practiced where you start out doing things like taking cold showers to suffer, or something. I think it is a back door approach to getting protestants to accept Catholicism, with things like having a confessor and a teacher of discipline. I think the Holy Spirit is who should hold those positions in our lives.

reply to post by akushla99


Ah, Satan - that's another topic altogether, but I think it's best interpreted as an egoic will to power, and seen as an "it", as a flaw, an abberation, arising within the domain of freedom, a usurper who thinks its God, in psychological terms, our deluded self, in larger terms perhaps a demiurge or a false-God as creator-God, unaware of his own trascendant nature (a very complex issue), one which Jesus resolved when stating "I was with you BEFORE the foundation of the world". I even imagine that when foresaken on the cross, that Jesus was having an experience of the demiurge, having collected his power, literally hanging him out to dry, and the REAL God, the God of love, kicking back in when the work was "accomplished", and thus revealing the demiurge's "mental illness" to the full awareness of the transcendant Godhead as well as the entire creation which bears witness.
In other words, it was an accident born of delusion and freedom, a fly in the ointment so to speak, but yes, one that we can no longer externalize.
It's certainly a controversy or conspiracy of the farthest reaching proportions however, and something that we can ALL learn from, hopefully, right across the board or across the entire specturm of all being and becoming.

"All of creation groans in travail for the revelation of the sons of God."

We must somehow sublimate "satan" (small s), in our followership of Jesus Christ, and in so doing reconcile the whole of creation back to God as the God of love, not of domination and submission / might-makes-right.

reply to post by jmdewey60


I meant as a mechanism for personal and mutual growth and well being, so as to begin the process of rubbing out the blindspot that causes us to sin needlessly or unconsciously. There has to be discipline, I don't think anyone would deny that, that in many areas we're going to have to move against the flow of bad habit for a while, to get flowing in the right direction.

Originally posted by sageofmonticello
reply to post by jmdewey60

 

Ahhh. I get it now.
Thank you for explaining.

Thanks for the opportunity to present this idea.

On a different topic brought up by another poster, I want to say something about where this word comes from that was used in the Greek New Testament.
Imagine you are in a gang of thieves or maybe a group of soldiers involved in the taking of a town. You have five men in a detachment that goes into a house and find for pieces of loot, lets say four nice bronze vessels. You each carry around a marker which is mostly identical to the markers carried by your fellows for such purposes. You decide to distribute the loot by throwing your marker, from a designated point, into the opening of the one you want. Four of you manage to get their marker in but one misses when he throws his marker. He gets nothing.

reply to post by NewAgeMan


Then we are saying the same thing, regardless of man-made religious proclivity.

Water comes out of the sky, that, feeds into a dam, that makes its way through pipes...to a 'tap'.

The 'tap' isn't the water, although everything along that line, can contain 'water'...some of it purer, than other issue.

The concept of sin hints at the need to purify the water, when the problem is the carrier (namely, sinners), and, there really only seems to be one rule that takes care of this. Love one another, as you would be loved. The rest seems to me to be, pulling apart the plumbing, sending the metal/ceramics/plastic away to be forensically investigated...and starting again.

Love one another as you would be loved. The rest (if I'm following it correctly) will 'butterfly effect' its way along. There doesn't seem to be any time in written history where this has been followed through with.

So, here we are, talking about sin.

Akushla

reply to post by NewAgeMan

. . .in larger terms perhaps a demiurge or a false-God as creator-God,. . .

I think that was why Genesis 1 was written because without it, you could easily believe in the demiurge, over the false-god. I think Genesis one does a lot to tip the balance more towards the original creation being OK and done properly with agreement between all the Elohim.

reply to post by akushla99

Yes, and the source is love, forget the "infrastructure", and complex conceptualizations of cosmology and cosmogency. I guess my point was that perhaps even God became deluded about his own true self, and it took a man named Jesus to set things right, both within, and without.

I love discussions about the end of evil and the end of satan - puts the whole world on notice, and pumps water throughout the whole human infrastructure.. may we stand firm in love.

reply to post by NewAgeMan


In Love we stand firm.

Akushla

reply to post by jmdewey60


I think the "us" of God in Genesis refers only to two, since God is love (between a lover and beloved other) ie: "I was with you since before the foundation of the world."