Sinning, as Jesus and the church say, is good. Turn or burn Christians.

[Greatest I am]

Understanding what is natural, in this case evolution, does not certify what is or is not right.  We're having a conversation about the latter in the case of sin, not the former.

I don't know that it's a fact that evolution has us trend toward cooperation, or that we can say in any unqualified way that cooperation is the best survival technique - but even if we assume that it were, and is, this is not a comment about morality, but about what is natural.

Evolution works and is right for all life.

As tribal creatures, it is obvious that we are led to cooperate otherwise we would never get the chance to grow up.

We suckle the breast. We do not bite it. That is cooperation.

Regards
DL

---

Indeed, to conflate evolution with morality smells of the naturalistic fallacy (not be confused with appeal to nature fallacy). I think I understand sin a bit more, but there are probably more gaps than I'd like.

I agree and did not do so.

I just showed that science applies moral labels to our instinctual action and that they have analogies in religions.

Regards
DL

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that you're confusing two very simple things. That evolution works, with evolution being right. OFC it works. It works for more than just cooperation, too. The behaviors you would describe as bad are no more or less natural, also products of evolution.

Let's try a little thought experiment. If it turned out that cooperation was the worst survival strategy, and annihilation was what worked, would you consider annihilation right?

[Greatest I am]

I think that you're confusing two very simple things.  That evolution works, with evolution being right.  OFC it works.  It works for more than just cooperation, too.  The behaviors you would describe as bad are no more or less natural, also products of evolution.

Let's try a little thought experiment.  If it turned out that cooperation was the worst survival strategy, and annihilation was what worked, would you consider annihilation right?

I would likely be slaved to my instincts, the same way that I am slaved to them now.

It happens that our instincts want order and security and reject chaos or competition as the best for us when young.

Only when we pass the age of reason, and begin to compete, can we do it intelligently.

Regards
DL

[The Grand Nudger]

If we're discussing a creature strongly compelled by it's instincts - enslaved as you put it - then that would have to go into baking the cake. That would be a better candidate for sin because it accounts for a wider range of behaviors and outcomes than competition. We don't have to compete with anyone to follow an instinctual drive that happens to be immoral. There doesn't have to be a girl involved.

[Greatest I am]

If we're discussing a creature strongly compelled by it's instincts - enslaved as you put it - then that would have to go into baking the cake.   That would be a better candidate for sin because it accounts for a wider range of behaviors and outcomes than competition.  We don't have to compete with anyone to follow an instinctual drive that happens to be immoral.  There doesn't have to be a girl involved.

I would need a real world example of what you posit, but are you saying that we are not instinct driven to reproduce?

What instinctive drive do you see as immoral? I do not see any, even as competition has a small evil component. 

Regards
DL

[The Grand Nudger]

If you can't imagine how any human instinct would compel us to immoral behavior - then I can't help you understand sin in the greater context of it's development as an idea. Frankly, the question makes no sense at all in light of your previous remarks about the moral state of our natural impulses.

It's like asking me what's bad about skullfucking my neighbors kids, but..impressively, worse. What's bad about an instinct to skullfuck my neighbors kids, if I'm a slave to instinct? What could possibly go wrong if a bunch of very competent but importantly enslaved creatures went about doing whatever their instincts - granted by evolution on a meat grinding planet - suggested?

: looks around at the state of the world :

Why are we destroying the earth? Why are we exploiting each other? Do abusers only strike their victims after a long and deliberative process and never on a whim? Why do I eat the donut knowing I shouldn't? Why do people leave shopping carts sitting in parking lots? Why do people fight or compete over a girl.....? On and on and on and on.

That's what sin is meant to convey.

[Greatest I am]

If you can't imagine how any human instinct would compel us to immoral behavior - then 

- why would you think I can, given that you cannot show an example of what you are talking about?

": looks around at the state of the world :

I see a lot more good in people than evil, while recognizing that their good would pay better if the good got organized and united.

Regards
DL

[The Grand Nudger]

Again, inexplicable. It doesn't concern our discussion what the relative amounts of good and evil in the world are. Sin is exclusively concerned with the bad, whatever the relative amount. Sure, sin makes us do The Big Bads, the murders and rapes that we use all the time to reduce these convos to simpler binaries - but it also accounts for leaving shopping carts in parking lots.

You, yourself...in this thread, have offered examples of where you think instinctual drives amount to bad things™. I've been suggesting that these representatives that you've offered are members of a larger set, and sin is a term used to refer to some common factor between those things in that larger set. That, for example, our completely natural tendency to use the least amount of effort for the maximum gain is a part of why we find ourselves with our hands on the cart, 20 feet from the cart area...and leaving it. Something suggests that it's not worth our time and trouble, that it's not that big a deal, that we should do it, leave it there. If all that sin was trying to account for were these little bads - there would still be these little bads, and these myriad relationships between moral states and practical actions.

[Greatest I am]

Again, inexplicable.  It doesn't concern our discussion what the relative amounts of good and evil in the world are.  Sin is exclusively concerned with the bad, whatever the relative amount.  Sure, sin makes us do The Big Bads, the murders and rapes that we use all the time to reduce these convos to simpler binaries - but it also accounts for leaving shopping carts in parking lots.

You, yourself...in this thread, have offered examples of where you think instinctual drives amount to bad things™.  

Eh, a small bad within a greater good. Overall, competition and it's small internal evil cannot end or we would go extinct.

Those big bad things you mention, to me, are mental aberrations and not present in the norm. They are abnormal actions and not normal ones.

Regards
DL

[The Grand Nudger]

-and all of that is fine. You can use whatever system you like to weigh and then judge the relative practical merits of a little bad for a greater good or any combination of the two. You can set your norms and your aberrations and pronounce events as failing in either category.

Sin, very plainly, is about whatever it is that compels human beings to do whatever bad, or whatever aberration....of whatever amount, by whatever metrics, that we do. The concept is necessarily and explicitly broad - attempting to account for a range of those behaviors - not one specific behavior.