(June 12, 2016 at 7:10 am)robvalue Wrote: Sure. It's a list of actions that someone comes up with, which are meant to represent things God doesn't want you to do. If you do one of them, you "sin". So you've broken those rules, nothing more.
Ah I see. If that is what you mean by the word sin, then NO, I do not believe sin is a real thing.
Instead, sin, like the word "evil", is not a "positive" reality. Those words are short-hand for the lacking of the "positive" reality.
Evil is more general, and is short-hand for a lack or goodness/truth/being in general.
Sin is short-hand for the lack of the goodness/truth/being corresponding to human action (by which I mean free/voluntary action). More properly, and more colloquially, it only applies to those human actions which lack the sufficient goodness to fulfill your own human life (which would include the social dimension of human reality). Sinful actions, in other words, would be those actions which are incapable of bringing about a fulfilled human life, and the sinfulness of the action is determined by a synthesis of the relative objective reality and circumstantial subjective judgment.
One of our revered saints (Irenaeus) from the 2nd century once said that, "The glory of God is man fully alive." You might say (at least I do) that sin, in god's eyes, is our wasting of the potential of our humanity.
