Sin. What is it? - by Gray
Naartjie on 18/11/2019 at 19:01
You quite often see this picture in discussions online of how the western medieval Church viewed the issue of sexual sin:
Inline Image:
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/flowchart2.pngIt's a funny picture, but the image is often (mis)used to make a point about how totalitarian and oppressive the Catholic Church was in the Middle Ages, or how bizarre people's beliefs were back then. What's often overlooked is that this is just a compilation of lots of different prohibitions on sexual behaviour that were enforced (successfully or not) at different times over a long period.
In reality views about sex and sin were much more nuanced and could depend on context. For example, between about 1350-1550, in many parts of Europe towns ran brothels whose existence was seen as necessary by the Church to provide an outlet for unmarried men who might otherwise endanger honourable women. This was seen as a lesser evil than banning prostitution outright (St Augustine talks about this problem specifically in his treatise
De Ordine, or 'On Order').
(the flowchart is originally from James Brundage's book
Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, which is mostly about the medieval canon law and its impact on everyday life)
Sulphur on 19/11/2019 at 04:22
(
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/are-babies-born-good-165443013/) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/are-babies-born-good-165443013/
'Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children's nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue. Yes, a baby prefers the good guy—unless the bad one, like the baby, eats graham crackers. If the good guy is a green-bean eater, forget it.'
Altruism != conscience, but you do you.
Nicker on 19/11/2019 at 04:37
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Biological instinct is fundamentally different from conscience, though it might seem like the same thing.
How do you know this is true? How could you tell the difference? Do you consider morality and conscience to be the same thing or conscience to be a manifestation of morality, a signal?
Morality is not a human artifice. It is not exclusive to humans. It only exists in social animals but it does exist in all social animals. So it is an instinct The fact that we codify it and give it names, like sin or law, is just our semantic circuit doing its instinctive thing.
Sin is a label, not a thing.
Sulphur on 19/11/2019 at 04:47
Quote Posted by Nicker
How do you know this is true? How could you tell the difference? Do you consider morality and conscience to be the same thing or conscience to be a manifestation of morality, a signal?
I'm not sure why one would consider morality and conscience to be the same thing - if they were, they'd have the same meaning. Morality is a more-or-less baseline set of universally agreed principles, while conscience is individual, personal and therefore not so easy to agree upon. It's well and good to argue moral consequences, but if an immoral act doesn't trigger anything in one person's conscience but does so in an other's, we've something that's obviously either got different baselines, is malleable, or forms through a different bunch of variables for each person.
Quote:
Morality is not a human artifice. It is not exclusive to humans. It only exists in social animals but it does exist in all social animals. So it is an instinct The fact that we codify it and give it names, like sin or law, is just our semantic circuit doing its instinctive thing.
Agreed. I don't know about the bearing it has on anything we're talking about, but sure.
Nicker on 19/11/2019 at 04:49
Quote Posted by Renzatic
Total aside here, but doesn't it make a fuckton more sense to have the new year start when all the leaves and crap start blooming in spring? Why end it smack dab in the deadest ass part of winter? Usher in the new year when the weather starts getting warm again, I say!
The symbolism is of death and rebirth. The new year starts with the death of the old year. The seed in the cold earth, gestation. Spring is the birthing.
Also I think that people needed some sort of optimistic symbolism for the middle of winter, some reassurance that there was hope, even if it was buried under the snow.
Nicker on 19/11/2019 at 05:02
Quote Posted by Sulphur
I'm not sure why one would consider morality and conscience to be the same thing...
Agreed. I don't know about the bearing it has on anything we're talking about, but sure.
Perhaps the conscience is the feedback signal, telling us that we have done something good or bad.
I think instinctual nature of morality has a lot of bearing on the subject. It means that sin is the human artifice. It is an arbitrary set of values imposed on our instinctual morality. Sin agrees with many of those moral values then pastes a bunch of artificial morals on top of them. The same justifications that we use to augment natural morals with artificial ones (sins and virtues) also allows us to circumvent our morality. It is a virtue to torture and murder someone, to save their immortal soul from sin...
I guess it depends on whether this discussion is about the realities of sin or the doctrines invented about it.
Gray on 19/11/2019 at 06:32
That actually helps. Thank you.
Mr.Duck on 19/11/2019 at 10:05
I am sin.
<3
demagogue on 19/11/2019 at 12:31
While this is up, I saw an interesting article. The Pope said he was considering introducing a new category of sin to the catechism, (
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7693147/Pope-Francis-considers-introducing-new-ecological-sin-bid-battle-climate-change.html) ecological sin. How possible is it that there could have been this entire category of sin it took 2000 years to come around to discovering? Is sin the kind of thing that can evolve over time?
Incidentally, maybe I've been influenced by Eastern religions, but I tend to think of religion as a practice or discipline, like the way in Japan calligraphy or martial arts or meditation are spiritual kinds of practices. You could opt out of doing them altogether. But if you're going to do them at all, you should do them according to the rules. That's kind of how I approach theological things. There's a set narrative and rules that gives everything meaning. If you're going to play the game, I think you ought to stick to that -- you bracket the world you're talking about with just the rules you have at hand -- or you should just say you're not participating.
I'm not one to say everyone ought to think like that. But ... I guess to use the discipline analogy again, the human body is capable of really interesting things in, say, judo or aikido, and the point of those disciplines is to hone, and give structure to, and make precise the motions to really crystallize how they work as a practice (e.g., grapples and pivots and such). And it turns out humans also have this capacity to see spiritual meaning in things and experience that spiritual meaning in a really direct and visceral way, and Christianity and other mature religions also hone and give structure to them.
A person could just completely ignore that side of themselves, just like a person could commit to never having sex or never eating food with flavor, so cooking would be a pointless art to them. But if someone wanted to engage with those experiences, then they could do it flopping at random (lol anything goes in the pot, one flavor is as good as another / lol spirituality is anything I think has an aura, so rubbing this rock is as meaningful as anything) or they could follow a discipline and really draw out deep aspects of those experiences. So that's what a religion can offer a person if they sign up for it, at least if they sign up for the discipline part of it, at least the way I see it. If somebody said those experiences are fake and pointless so what's the point, that's fine, but it also sounds to me like someone saying taste is fake and pointless so what's the point of cooking.
One punchline is that religion should then have value just as far as it actually engages those experiences, and if it derails from them, as I think it does in a lot of ways, then it's like cooking that's derailed from being about taste anymore. So people that care about religious experiences would do well IMO to keep working and refining the discipline. They don't have to be content with the received version if it's not doing what it should be doing for them. Again, if they care about engaging it at all.