Sin is not evil?

[Jan Ardena]

Then what does the term "evil" mean to you?

Evil is when a person of authority, knowingly takes advantage of, or leads a willing person looking from guidance, down the wrong path.

jan.

 

[SolusCado]

Not in MY book - it's evil personified.

But again, a personification does not define it. How would I use your example to identify other things that are "evil"? There must be some definition for the word that enables us to understand to what things it applies.

 

[birch]

people will differ in how they define evil. i would say evil is intentional motive to cause harm or an indifference to the harm they know they are causing. i would say evil is a strong word and there are evil intentions which involve malice and even sadism. mistake and evil have two very different connotatons. mistake signifies a nonintention to cause harm, even if that may be the result but at least in those situations the one even causing the mistake will work to remedy or change it so there is room to learn. why evil is calling a spade a spade and much more difficult or resistant is because where true evil is concerned, it was intentional which is another ball game.

 

[SolusCado]

The death of billions for lasting peace among thousands....

That would be evil...because its about a majority vote in the end, and the majority lost, right?

Says who? Some might say that the end of all conflict would be the ultimate "good".

But good and evil can't be defined directly unless one uses the bible or something similar where it says, "this is the word of God, all else is incorrect!" you know then and there it's true, haha. Unless you have a book that is universally accepted as THE WORD. As the final say-all, tell-all guide to human interaction, a book that goes over every nuance of humanity, you can never ever define evil and good, because it doesn't exist outside of human beings, and there are 8 billion particles of humanity for that book to cover successfully and unerringly...

Agreed, which is why I posted this in Religion and not Philosophy. My thought here is within the confines of Christianity as a religion, do we have it wrong by considering sin to be evil? Is that really what the original authors meant?

Mentally ill is the chemical imbalance that is found, the atypical interactions undergone by the ill...just as any other "illness" is a deviation from general health.

Ah, but over time the atypical sometimes becomes the typical. Some mental illness may simply be the precursor to natural selection ramping up and weeding out what is currently "typical".

 

[SolusCado]

people will differ in how they define evil. i would say evil is intentional motive to cause harm or an indifference to the harm they know they are causing. i would say evil is a strong word and there are evil intentions which involve malice and even sadism. mistake and evil have two very different connotatons. mistake signifies a nonintention to cause harm, even if that may be the result but at least in those situations the one even causing the mistake will work to remedy or change it so there is room to learn. why evil is calling a spade a spade and much more difficult or resistant is because where true evil is concerned, it was intentional which is another ball game.

That distinction between evil and mistake is why I think it is a critical question to ask and answer. Again, within the confines of the Christian Theology/Religion, was the original intent to call out the laundry list of actions as mistakes or as evil? Because our society (particularly the fundamentalist Christians) has a tendency to label sin as evil.

 

[Adstar]

I have a problem with the various powers that have represented Christianity over the last couple thousand years and the way they inject their own personal beliefs into the scriptures that are treated as canon. The Catholic church is of course the most notable offender, but there are countless Protestant denominations that have done the same. This has led me to pretty much question everything, and the most recent subject to fall under my scrutiny is the meaning of "sin". If we reread the Bible (even in the modern English translations), and simply remove our understanding of the meaning of the word sin, and instead attempt to glean its meaning based on its context, it doesn't necessarily mean "evil" in the degree or context we have assigned it.

Upon doing some additional research, I have found that the Hebrew word that is usually translated to "sin" is the word "chet", which is also used in countless other areas where we would never think to assign a sense of "evil". In fact, it would seem to simply mean "mistake" - not necessarily indicating any particular malfeasance at all, but rather something less than perfect. Well, I know of no one would suggest humans ARE perfect - so this would make perfect sense to me. Any other thoughts or contributions to the subject out there?

God is perfect. So therefore anything that falls short of perfection, (call it what you will, assign to it what you will) causes one to fall short of perfection.

Therefore God provides us with Jesus. His Atonement covers our imperfection. Regardless how that imperfection is seen my you or anyone else. The evilness or otherwise of the imperfections is irrelevant to the need to have thoes imperfections covered.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

 

[CHRISCUNNINGHAM]

Says who? Some might say that the end of all conflict would be the ultimate "good".

You're right! I am, in fact, one of those people that would call it the ultimate "good". When I said "the majority decides evil" I was taking a more basic view of moralistic relativism that puts the majority as center. And truly that is what modern societal "understanding" of evil comes down to. To contrast this idea of majority rules is why I brought up the cultures that eat their parents' remains. I can't remember their geographical location or their names, but it was in a wonderful book called "Religion Explained" by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer. I never got to finish the book because I left it somewhere and have yet to buy another, but it was very interesting to me that such cultures still existed. It's a rather effective way to exploit our preferred frame of reference.

I thought about posting that proposition, actually, in the forums to see how people would react to it, but I'm sure the arguments would be akin to "cannibalism is not something Jesus teaches us is right, except when it comes to eating from His Body, and His spirit"--which is wrong, haha. And others would simply call it barbarian because we are past the age of reason, and write it off, so I decided not to post it. But even in my own assessment of it, I had to realize myself that I thought like that sometimes before I could reconcile with its inherent fallacies.

Agreed, which is why I posted this in Religion and not Philosophy. My thought here is within the confines of Christianity as a religion, do we have it wrong by considering sin to be evil? Is that really what the original authors meant?

I am sure we have it wrong along with 85% of the terms and conditions in the bible. The original authors likely meant what I was stating earlier, the mistake itself is NOT evil, it is caused BY evil.

The snake is evil...eating the apple is sin, sin is a "transgression of God's will". Sin is a PRODUCT of evil. It's what people do when they don't let the goodness and perfection of God into their hearts, they are not EVIL because they don't let goodness and perfection of God into their heart, they are misguided and tempted BY Evil.

Evil is the force that takes over in the absence of God, or for the resident Christians who would say he can never be "absent", I mean in the rejection of God.

But evil is relative, and irrelevant to human progress. Evil bounds man to the banana tree, and leaves him too weak to climb the mountains. We sit and try to "rid the world" of evil, when really the only thing we need to do is "rid our perceptions" of the concept "evil", as if it's some driving force in nature, that has thus stifled man's evolution...and really it is, haha, but for different reasons than most would proclaim.

If humanity realized that "evil" is an idea created by the slave morality, as we are slaves to nature itself, and truly eradicated it within its own species, man would then realize that it is more important to see detriments and sins as MISTAKES. Mistakes that can be learned from and avoided.

Murder is bad for society (in most cases) stealing is BAD for society (in most cases) lust is BAD for the continued partner structure of human child-rearing and thus, society. But none of these things are EVIL...they're humanistic propensities. Evil is what they've been labeled as by the contemporary and most recent authors and interpreters of the bible, those with anthropocentric idealism that ignores the fact that the universe outside of man's neurological/emotional afflictions appears indifferent to mans pains and sufferings, such things are simply a part of the process...

Ah, but over time the atypical sometimes becomes the typical. Some mental illness may simply be the precursor to natural selection ramping up and weeding out what is currently "typical".

I agree, and when talking about this post actually (and the other one about religious experiments in place of psychiatry) with a friend of mine at a bar last night, we talked about the idea of medicare and such actually HINDERING the evolution process by leaving more of the homo-sapien sapien alive as a sickly species when compared to the other species in our niche whose resources we are burning through carelessly.

Illness, as defined by dictionaries and man alike, call it an indisposition, a "sickness", a deviation from general "health". When someone is "healthy" they are a "full function" person who can go though life, providing their services to humanity without medications and "detrimental" human interactions with the majority of their fellow humans.

I was on the way out the door when I posted it, but in my post, though cryptic, I was saying that deviations are simply deviations, consequentially high IQ's are as much a mental illness as low IQ's, except when considering that people with "high IQ's" give more to society and those with "low IQ's" take more resources to maintain without any compensated emolument TO society in their maintenance. Sounds awful elitist, barbaric, and "evil" to say, right?

But in all actuality what works BEST in evolution works by consequence in nature. And in our attempts to control evolution, we are perhaps destroying (really just slowing down) its driving force.

What I concluded, however, is that when we understand these deviations, when we see HOW we can control them, then we find out how we can CREATE them, and kick start evolution. How we can combine genetic strands that, overall, are best fit for the current natural barriers in front of human evolution.

Alas, I feel that the mathematically chaotic structure of evolution and nature's complex interactions, make humans wholly incapable of "fixing" evolution. But it HAS to start with the realization that we COULD given the resources and mathematical sophistication to do so. But at this point, with current moral relativism and bureaucracy hindering the progress in genetics and science funding in general, we have little hope of making any progress in the calculable future on the subject.

 

[SolusCado]

You're right! I am, in fact, one of those people that would call it the ultimate "good". When I said "the majority decides evil" I was taking a more basic view of moralistic relativism that puts the majority as center. And truly that is what modern societal "understanding" of evil comes down to. To contrast this idea of majority rules is why I brought up the cultures that eat their parents' remains. I can't remember their geographical location or their names, but it was in a wonderful book called "Religion Explained" by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer. I never got to finish the book because I left it somewhere and have yet to buy another, but it was very interesting to me that such cultures still existed. It's a rather effective way to exploit our preferred frame of reference.

I thought about posting that proposition, actually, in the forums to see how people would react to it, but I'm sure the arguments would be akin to "cannibalism is not something Jesus teaches us is right, except when it comes to eating from His Body, and His spirit"--which is wrong, haha. And others would simply call it barbarian because we are past the age of reason, and write it off, so I decided not to post it. But even in my own assessment of it, I had to realize myself that I thought like that sometimes before I could reconcile with its inherent fallacies.




I am sure we have it wrong along with 85% of the terms and conditions in the bible. The original authors likely meant what I was stating earlier, the mistake itself is NOT evil, it is caused BY evil.

The snake is evil...eating the apple is sin, sin is a "transgression of God's will". Sin is a PRODUCT of evil. It's what people do when they don't let the goodness and perfection of God into their hearts, they are not EVIL because they don't let goodness and perfection of God into their heart, they are misguided and tempted BY Evil.

Evil is the force that takes over in the absence of God, or for the resident Christians who would say he can never be "absent", I mean in the rejection of God.

But evil is relative, and irrelevant to human progress. Evil bounds man to the banana tree, and leaves him too weak to climb the mountains. We sit and try to "rid the world" of evil, when really the only thing we need to do is "rid our perceptions" of the concept "evil", as if it's some driving force in nature, that has thus stifled man's evolution...and really it is, haha, but for different reasons than most would proclaim.

If humanity realized that "evil" is an idea created by the slave morality, as we are slaves to nature itself, and truly eradicated it within its own species, man would then realize that it is more important to see detriments and sins as MISTAKES. Mistakes that can be learned from and avoided.

Murder is bad for society (in most cases) stealing is BAD for society (in most cases) lust is BAD for the continued partner structure of human child-rearing and thus, society. But none of these things are EVIL...they're humanistic propensities. Evil is what they've been labeled as by the contemporary and most recent authors and interpreters of the bible, those with anthropocentric idealism that ignores the fact that the universe outside of man's neurological/emotional afflictions appears indifferent to mans pains and sufferings, such things are simply a part of the process...




I agree, and when talking about this post actually (and the other one about religious experiments in place of psychiatry) with a friend of mine at a bar last night, we talked about the idea of medicare and such actually HINDERING the evolution process by leaving more of the homo-sapien sapien alive as a sickly species when compared to the other species in our niche whose resources we are burning through carelessly.

Illness, as defined by dictionaries and man alike, call it an indisposition, a "sickness", a deviation from general "health". When someone is "healthy" they are a "full function" person who can go though life, providing their services to humanity without medications and "detrimental" human interactions with the majority of their fellow humans.

I was on the way out the door when I posted it, but in my post, though cryptic, I was saying that deviations are simply deviations, consequentially high IQ's are as much a mental illness as low IQ's, except when considering that people with "high IQ's" give more to society and those with "low IQ's" take more resources to maintain without any compensated emolument TO society in their maintenance. Sounds awful elitist, barbaric, and "evil" to say, right?

But in all actuality what works BEST in evolution works by consequence in nature. And in our attempts to control evolution, we are perhaps destroying (really just slowing down) its driving force.

What I concluded, however, is that when we understand these deviations, when we see HOW we can control them, then we find out how we can CREATE them, and kick start evolution. How we can combine genetic strands that, overall, are best fit for the current natural barriers in front of human evolution.

Alas, I feel that the mathematically chaotic structure of evolution and nature's complex interactions, make humans wholly incapable of "fixing" evolution. But it HAS to start with the realization that we COULD given the resources and mathematical sophistication to do so. But at this point, with current moral relativism and bureaucracy hindering the progress in genetics and science funding in general, we have little hope of making any progress in the calculable future on the subject.

I agree 99.9%. The whole thing I would point out is that high IQs don't necessarily yield a person who gives more back to society. In fact, in my high school, our 'Gifted' programs were considered part of the 'Special Eduction' program, lumped in with the low IQ individuals. The high IQs were recognized as a learning disorder, and truly some of the people with the highest IQs have difficulty functioning in society.

 

[CHRISCUNNINGHAM]

Yes I wanted to get into that, but for non-prattling purposes I didn't. Haha. I should have been more specific in saying the lowest IQs of the 97th percentile, because the people I had in mind were people capable of doing scientific work that betters the human standard of living and understanding while not being wholly absorbed in their intelligence that their social contributions begin to waver.

I am one of those people, haha. But I feel that I can't contribute to society, because society is lost in consumerism, nationalism, and the betterment of individual standards of living rather than the betterment of humanity's standard of living.

It's just awful for me to sit back and watch an airplane attempt to land when I am holding its landing gear in my lap...

 

[NMSquirrel]

doesn't

What I concluded, however, is that when we understand these deviations, when we see HOW we can control them, then we find out how we can CREATE them, and kick start evolution. How we can combine genetic strands that, overall, are best fit for the current natural barriers in front of human evolution.

ends up being..

Once we understand these deviations, when we see HOW we can control them, then we find out how we can CREATE them, and kick start evolution. How we can combine genetic strands that, overall, are best fit for the current economically fit.

IOW..those that can pay for it..

 

[SolusCado]

doesn't




ends up being..

Once we understand these deviations, when we see HOW we can control them, then we find out how we can CREATE them, and kick start evolution. How we can combine genetic strands that, overall, are best fit for the current economically fit.

IOW..those that can pay for it..

I suspect that, in all practicality, by the time genetic enhancements are routine, there will be a movement that makes them a "right" to all citizens. Of course, that's not to say other countries won't be left in the dark..

 

[John99]

There must be some definition for the word that enables us to understand to what things it applies.

Actually there isnt. How words evolve is another issue and i think the word has evolved but very little. The problem with this is that evil, as has been stated and afaik is accurate, has a supernatural connotation attached to it.

So to say "he is just evil" can mean:

A: He is a bad person

B: His is an EXTREMELY homicidally bad person

C: His actions are due to malevolent (external) forces

At C we know some people do believe in external supernatural forces and tbh, afaik that is where the term is derived from.

 

[birch]

Because our society (particularly the fundamentalist Christians) has a tendency to label sin as evil.

this is because evil acts or intentions as well as any unethical action are considered a sin. some acts may be more grevious or malicious than others but still falls under sin. sin also insinuates a willingness to act in unethical ways. if you accidently answer a question wrong on a test, that does not really fall under the definition of sin but a mistake. it could be said that the religion's call to conscience is just another pointing out the sin like a mirror so one cannot keep excusing themselves. whether one chooses to sin or not is still there choice though.

 

[SolusCado]

this is because evil acts or intentions as well as any unethical action are considered a sin. some acts may be more grevious or malicious than others but still falls under sin. sin also insinuates a willingness to act in unethical ways. if you accidently answer a question wrong on a test, that does not really fall under the definition of sin but a mistake. it could be said that the religion's call to conscience is just another pointing out the sin like a mirror so one cannot keep excusing themselves. whether one chooses to sin or not is still there choice though.

I think that this is a result of centuries of misinterpration of the word sin, and is kinda my point.