"sin" as: doing something that might be locally good for you but destroys the environment on which you rely
Sin as parts destroying the environment they depend on
24 tweets · May 2024 · 562 likes · 25 retweets · read on Twitter
the simplest prototypical example of "sin" in this sense is cancer. cancer isn't selfish. it doesn't "take over" in any glorious/victorious way, it merely replicates until it destroys its environment, then oops—dies
lying to friends, family, allies, is a sin because it undermines the commons of honesty, integrity, etc lying to nazis is not a sin
adultery is a sin because it undermines stability of families & marriages greed is a sin because the desire to possess & control wealth messes with its ability to flow in a living way wrath is a sin because it creates a more violent environment that comes back to bite you
huh, this explains why a lot of moralizing these days is happening about climate change etc. the most obvious way in which humanity is presently sinning is that it's destroying its environment, polluting etc. tho directing this at individuals is mostly the wrong agency-scale
sometimes something that used to be a sin is no longer a sin because we've found ways to mitigate the ways in which it harmed its environment (tho sometimes this is itself hubris and there are other harms not mitigated)
this is part of why conservativism tends towards seeing more things in terms of sin (whether or not it uses that word, which ofc generally has a religious connotation that I'm not intending to imply here)
because yeah, this doesn't presuppose an external god who punishes you for sins like a parent striking or grounding a disobedient child reality's natural consequences punish you for your sins, but later—perhaps generations later
if it gets you generations later, then in some sense the entity that is sinning is arguably not even quite the individual but the family or bloodline or company or community or society or something like that... but humans care about those thriving as well.
in choiceless societies, rocking the boat at all is a sin because the social environment is fragile to destruction from any questioning of the norms on which it's based
this is instructive: it highlights that sometimes sin at one scale creates new wholesomeness on a larger scale the destroying of an old order can also be part of making way for a new order (but not always!)
part of Jesus's wisdom was in highlighting ways in which things that were considered sins in specific Jewish law no longer needed to be but meanwhile other things that were considered fine were actually sins—and people could recognize this!
another part of Jesus's wisdom was in highlighting that most sins don't need to be punished BY HUMANS. the consequences are meted by God (read: the natural unfolding of everything, not sky-daddy)
but part of how the consequences unfold is THROUGH humans. if you're a jerk, people won't want to hang out with you. and we have courts of law. if you bother a cat, it will claw at you and/or ignore you
but as an ego/self, you want to forgive other selves, in order to create space for your learning and their learning it is, in fact, a sin not to do so (and I forgive you!)
and of course you also want to forgive yourself!
Matthew 5:14-15 with God as Everything, not as Some Guy who won't go first in the forgiveness game > For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, Everything will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, Everything will not forgive your sins.
sometimes the reason it's hard to forgive is that the grudge is carrying a way in which you aren't in integrity in the situation you're in, and you need to get out
but when you can't get out, a different kind of forgiveness is both necessary and possible
me & @Morphenius preach forgiveness of sins without the need for believing anything about Jesus (you can see an intro here, which is super rough but some people have found it helped them!) youtube.com/watch?v=6Ykr2X…
@Morphenius if you like this thread on sinning, you'll love this thread on nissing!
"We are not punished for our sins, but by them." — Elbert Hubbard (as quoted by @slimepriestess)
@slimepriestess another angle on it: > Sin is just what they called behaviour that doesn't scale.
@slimepriestess could see it as the same structure but it's some part of you sinning against the whole of you (which is its environment) or locally can also mean temporally-local, like "feels good now but predictably fucks you up or messes up your feedback loops"