The stupidity of sin

[robvalue]

This is a generalisation of a particular broken mindset, I'm not suggesting every religious person thinks this way.

Sin has always struck me as one of the more obviously laughable aspects of religion. It appears to boil down to "things that upset God". I don't know how people can say how much superior God is to us one minute, then treat him like a sensitive toddler the next: all diving around in front of him trying to protect his feelings.

Who cares what God is upset by, or what he wants to happen? If he's so stupid as to create beings that regularly do things that make him really angry, or can't help doing crimes so heinous he feels they require tremendous punishment, he really has only himself to blame. If he wanted mindless drones, he should have made them. Fear and greed remain the only sensible motivations. The carrot and the stick.

Of course, the main trick is to conflate sin with immorality; things that are actually bad for us, or for each other. This seems to suggest he made us too stupid to know what is best for us, so he can enjoy bossing us around and always stopping us hurling ourselves off cliffs. If these really are the same thing, then god's disgust with such actions is irrelevant. Often I am hit with a No True Scotsman: whatever differences there are between my morality and the religious person's, I am doing it wrong. The things I am apparently doing wrong, or views I hold, tend to require ludicrously fallacious appeals to rationalise when the person won't come out and say "God says so". I'm perfectly capable of analysing the results of my actions. If someone wants to suggest alternative behaviour, that is fine, but they need to do better than "so and so said so". A set of simplistic rules will never suffice for the intracices of morality and wellbeing, whoever wrote them.

Lastly I come to the really weird aspect of sin: it appears to be the person themselves upset by the sin, rather than their God. Can their God not handle its own upset? Can it not right any perceived wrongs? Can it not dish out its own punishment? Isn't it enough that the sinner is going to apparently be judged unworthy and given an inferior afterlife? Why does a thuggish religious person feel the need to persecute them and make their life miserable in the meantime? Of course, if there's an actual good reason to object to behaviour, then that's fine. If they are hurting someone, for example. But once you've resorted to "it's a sin", reason has left the building.

I'm often told I'm going to receive this shitty treatment from God just for not being in the right religion to begin with. Or perhaps just for being born. I'd rather stand up and do what I think is right, rather than bow to the whims of a judge like this. It seems he is too cowardly or lofty to come explain himself and sends me garbled contradictory messages through other people instead. I can't trust such an egotistical maniac to keep its word anyway. So why also be concerned about the details of my actions, when the only results are me making it worse for myself? It seems it's the thug who can't stand the sin, and who wants to be the judge. As always, God is simply a projection of the believer. You know, the "personal God". The one that agrees with everyone, while they disagree with each other.