If you say you don't believe there is such thing as sin?

Question

Does that mean you think any action you take is OK? What about abusing a child, rape, murder, robbery, etc...?

Do you have any standards that guide what you think is right or wrong?

What types of laws should we have? Who's standards of right and wrong should they be based on?

If you say they should be based on what the majority of people believe, what would happen if the majority of the people were wrong? (Like how Germans stood by and let the holocaust happen)

Just curious, as I have never understood exactly what people mean when they say they don't think there is such thing as sin.

Answer 1

Not "how many Germans stood by and let the Holocaust happen", but how many actually took an active role in the genocide. That's what amazes me. Sin lurks below the surface in all of us, to one degree or another. All of us are vulnerable. But the concept of right and wrong seems to be relative. Depends who you talk to. Someone who violates a child will barely make the news while a sack of kittens thrown into a river will give Katie Couric a heart attack. An abandoned newborn baby found dead in a toilet stall ain't no big thing, but a beached whale is huge news. How do you write laws to correct this sort of skewed behavior? You can't. The majority of the people believe a lot of nonsense. Just live your own life the best you can and keep in mind the the majority of people are wrong the majority of the time.

Answer 2

Sin is defined as an offense to a divine law giver, the breaking of divinely given laws.

Killing is against mortal laws -- but in a court, we call it a 'crime', not a 'sin'. So there is an explicit distinction of 'sin' being religious in nature.

Since I do not believe in a divine being, let alone one that gives out laws, I find sin to be a literal impossibility. How can I offend that which does not exist?

I do believe that there is still right and wrong, and that these things are hard wired into us in general via evolution. These come from the two instincts/predispositions known as Empathy and Altruism. People who lack empathy show traits of psychopathy, people who lack altruism show traits of sociopahty, people who lack both end up in prisons or mental hospitals where people occasionally look in on them through small barred windows in the door.

These are general instincts though, and how we interpret them through our consciousness is entirely up in the air. All morality is goal-based. That which is towards the goal is good, that which is away from the goal is bad. What the goal is, like it or not, is determined by the particular culture or subculture one finds themselves interacting with.

Answer 3

Sin is a way for people (priests) to make other people (believers) do what they want then to do.


Is slavery a sin? It was awfully prevalent in the bible. There is plenty to say how you should treat your slaves, who can be a slave etc.

If slavery is not a sin, is it immoral? Who decided that?



All ethics derive from the golden rule. Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Tribes worked this out way before they ever thought of the concept of gods.

Answer 4

Yes, that's right. I think everything is OK. Bring on the rape, abuse, robbery and torture.

That's why atheists are so under-represented in prisons, because they are so very, very immoral.

Grow up. Just because religious people have taken behavior that is antisocial, immoral, or not conducive to the betterment of society and stuck their own little label on it does NOT mean that they have the market cornered on what would be considered "right" - quite the opposite, in fact.

Answer 5

Your ignorance is staggering.

You seem to have your head so far up your God's *** that you can't differentiate between crime, abuse and sin.

Do you really have no other way of determining what is ethical than some tribal books from the ancient desert? That is pathetic.

Sin is a violation of the tribal laws of a Middle Eastern sect. I am not Middle Eastern and I do not accept that their laws have any precedence over the norms of any other society.

It means nothing to me as it is deeply flawed.

Answer 6

Knowing right from wrong is not synonimous with sin. Christianity invented sin, so those who aren't Christian feel free to disagree with their definition of sin.

It's easy to see that hurting other people, especially for no reason like in your list above, is not beneficial to anyone and is clearly wrong. However, saying that drinking alcohol or having sex is a sin, does not make it wrong in the eyes of many people. Thus, not everyone believes in sin.

Answer 7

Just because we do not submit to a religion does not mean we do not have ethics.

I find it scary that the 10 commandments is the only thing holding christians back from the items you list. How about not doing them because it's simply wrong and not because some god supposedly told you not to?

Answer 8

I don't need the 10 Commandments to know that abusing children, killing people, etc, aren't a good thing.

I think it is called common sense.

Answer 9

You have mentioned crimes.

Pull your head out. The Holocaust was a "Crime Against Humanity".

Ignorance should be out-lawed.

Answer 10

Not very bright, are you. If you don't accept my religious categorization of an action, does that mean that you condone the action. Yes, that is pretty dumb.