People have different definitions of sin. But the real reason people use the word is because it sounds nastier than ‘immoral act’ or ‘unethical act’. As Wayne Slater notes, these terms carry with them a “secular sheen” which seems to imply one has merely broken ‘man’s law’ and not God’s law. This, perhaps, is why Robbi Yoffie said that, “absent sin, we are not responsible”. For some reason, simply doing something unethical is looked at as less than serious – as if one were guilty of merely breaking the rules posted around the swimming pool at the gym.
It makes perfect sense that this is how a religiously minded person might look at it. After all, they often view morality as being about following the commands of a powerful being, and that without such a being ready to smack you, you’d have no reason to be good. And, were it really the case that all the religious people of the world are only refraining from killing and robbing me because they’re afraid of God’s punishment, I would be quite concerned by, and for, these unfortunate folks.
So, when they imagine a secular person talking about being unethical, they imagine that spectrum of seriousness, at which God is offended on the far bad end – and then they imagine a person who has chopped off everything from that point onward, caring not about it. This leaves them thinking that such people simply don’t hold themselves accountable to that degree of seriousness. That is, after all, how they would go about it if they were going to ignore Godly matters.
This is their big mistake in perception of Humanists, however, and why they have trouble with facts that show non-religious people to be as ethical as themselves. What they do not seem to appreciate is that Humanists do appreciate the full spectrum of seriousness and responsibility. While we may not involve God on that far end, and may not use the word ‘sin’ to describe it – we take such offenses to be just as serious. So, comparing what a Humanist would call a ‘severely horrible and unethical act’ (on the far end of the spectrum), with what a Christian might identify by the same phrase (on the middle-to-end of the spectrum, just shy of official ‘sin’) is misleading. The two vocabularies are not parallel in that way.
Does the Humanist believe they will be spending an afterlife in Hell for sin? No, but then neither does the Christian, who believes they will be going to Heaven despite the fact that we all (themselves included) are sinners. Yet, where they really part ways, in many cases, is that most Humanists understand the more foundational reasons for ethics and morality, and why they are so important to the good life here and now – rather than thinking the only reason to be good is because of some external punishment or reward, as though one were still in a childish state of moral development.
But in the end, the real reason some conservative Christians might want to interject the word ‘sin’ into the political vocabulary is that it is a word and a concept intrinsically linked with their religion, and this will help to blend the two realms as they’d prefer. But they should ask themselves, what would making ‘sin’ a part of our political vocabulary entail? Who would be the ‘sinners’ if not everyone? And, more importantly, what politically powerful people and bodies would get to wield that word, with its powerful connotations, and… to what end?
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