Problems with the Concept of Sin
It’s an attempt to shift blame from God to human
Sin is part of the sales pitch of Christianity. Without sin, there is no need for salvation, and no need to convert to Christianity. That’s why many clerics and Christian opinion leaders like to talk about sin in their church and on social media. R. C. Sproul, just two months before his passing away, tweeted this:
We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.
He is not a lone voice, but a representation of common rhetoric found in many Christian churches. Hardly any church refrains from talking about sin.
But does the concept of sin in Christianity make sense under close scrutiny? My answer is a definite No. In this essay, I present my reasons for this conclusion.
Everyone is a sinner
One core doctrine in Christianity is that every person who lives to adulthood is a sinner. Even progressive Christianity could not get rid of this notion. People may not have to confess allegiance to Jesus to be saved, but they still need to be saved.
No one could save themselves. No one could live so upright that their actions are sufficient to earn them a place in heaven. God demands perfection, and since no one is perfect, no one could be found righteous without an external source of redemption (which is where Jesus comes in).
Which brings out an obvious question: Why did God create imperfect human beings and then expect them to be perfect in the first place?
Is that fair?
If a parent scolds a one-year-old child for not being able to solve a calculus question, is that fair?
Christians might say, “It’s not God’s fault. Humanity inherited its sinful nature from Adam. It was Adam’s fault.”
Leaving aside the question of why God would set up a system in which sinful nature spreads from parent to children, God knows we have sinful nature and are not free to not sin, right? So why does He still expect us to behave perfectly and avoid sinning when we are unable to do so?
If a child is born of a parent who used drugs during pregnancy, resulting in the child being severely mentally challenged, would we still expect the child to perform just as well as other normal children? If an adult says to this child, “You don’t know how to add or subtract at the age of 10? How stupid are you?”, would we think that is a fair judgment or an ignorant one? (To avoid misconstrual, I think it is not only ignorant but also heartless and vicious.)
Free will is no excuse
Christians often say we sin out of our free will, so we cannot blame God for our shortcomings or immoralities.
But the thing is, if we have free will, we should see some people sin, and others don’t sin. If everyone sins, it does not sound like free will, but that people are programmed to sin, with the result that they cannot help but sin. If everyone sins, without exceptions, how can we say it is an exercise of free will? It does not make sense.
If there is a defect in every person, such that every one of them sins, then common sense tells us that it is the creator’s fault, not the product’s.
On what ground does God have to punish his creation for the defect He left in them?
Some Christians, especially Calvinists, like to cite the book of Jeremiah.
So I (Jeremiah) went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel. (Jeremiah 18:3–6)
They claim that God has a right to do whatever He wants to human beings since they are his creation. But they are shooting themselves in the foot by appealing to this analogy of potter. Yes, the potter can fire a pot and smash it when he finds it defective, but would we say it is the pot’s own fault that it has defects? No! How narcissistic does the potter have to be to blame the pot for its defects? It’s the potter’s own fault! The clay just sits there to be molded and fired. It has no free will of its own, so it is innocent of any wrongdoing. No question about that!
Christians might as well slap their own face too when they cite the book of Jeremiah.
What is free will anyway?
If a software engineer creates a simple script that would randomly return “yes” or “no” when prompted, the engineer would expect it to return either “yes” or “no”, right? (It almost sounds silly that I have to make this clear.)
Suppose I run the script, and it returns “no”, and the engineer is surprised, commenting, “What the heck? I did not expect it to say ‘no’ to the user. This was not my intention. Something went wrong!” I ask the engineer, “Didn’t you write the code so that it would either say ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” And the engineer responds, “Yes, I did. But I thought the program would know better and would choose to say ‘yes’ every time. Even though I program it to say either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, I actually only want it to say ‘yes’, and if it says ‘no’, that is a bad script.” Wouldn’t you scratch your head and suspect this engineer may suffer from some type of mental illness?
If the engineer only wants the script to return “yes”, then he/she should just write the code so that the script will only return “yes” when prompted.
Christian readers, you understand the logic here, right? Yes?
Then tell me on what ground can God say human beings offend Him by sinning when it was He who gave human beings the ability to sin?
Christians would say, God does not want to create robots, but a creature with the ability to make free choices. God wants this creature to choose to love Him out of their free will.
Ok then, so did God get what He wanted? Did God get a bunch of human beings who freely choose to love Him all the time?
No!
What does He expect? Like I said above, if an engineer writes a code so it would randomly generate “yes” or “no”, then why would he expect it to always generate “yes”?
If free will is what God gave Adam and Eve, He should expect them to obey on some occasions, and disobey Him on other occasions. And surprise surprise! That’s what they did!
What’s more, somehow Adam and Eve’s sin could affect their offspring, so they all have the propensity to sin. The result is that God got every human being offending him and disobeying Him. Not what He wanted, right?
So much for free will! So much for wanting humans to choose to love God!
(Unless you believe that God is so sovereign that nothing could go against His Will, then we would have a bigger and more absurd problem. But I am not going there.)
And yet, we are supposed to believe that all this sin fiasco is human’s fault, that we should beg God for forgiveness because we have been naughty, even though, given our sinful nature (according to most Christians), we don’t really have a choice to not be naughty.
The level of mental gymnastics it takes to make all this rhetoric work is astonishing.
Some Christians will be tempted to shout “Jesus Christ”. Yah, but have you stopped sinning after you believe in Jesus? Could you stop sinning?
Conclusion
If Christians want to retain the concept of sin, it is better to blame it on God to keep it coherent. If you don’t want to blame God, since He is all perfect and cannot do anything wrong, then I’d suggest Christians do away with the concept of sin, and (if they will want to remain in faith) talk about wonderful relationships they have with God and how it brings meaning to their lives. There are a lot of good things Christianity can bring to humanity without condemning them and making them ashamed of their sin (it does not work anyway).
After reading this essay, do you still think the concept of sin in the Christian faith makes sense to you? Let me know in the comment section.
