Sunday 19 August 2001

Pic of the day: Sins of the Sims. Here's the larger original size, and here's the black & white. I found it vaguely appropriate.

Victimless sins

If you know anything at all about religions, you must have noticed that they have lists of stuff you are not supposed to do. (And, often forgotten, lists of stuff you are supposed to do.) In European languages, we have a word for stuff that is forbidden by a religion: Sin.

You have probably noticed that there is a slight difference between sin and crime, except in nations that base their law on a religion. To be a crime, something must either hurt someone or be really disgusting to most people. Sins, on the other hand, can be seemingly harmless and quite appealing.

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So, have these sins come into existence simply by the deity (or his/her followers) throwing dice over a list of fun thing, and picking some of them to be sins? It may seem that way at first glance: Hinduism prohibits eating beef, Judaism and Islam prohibit eating pork. Christianity forbids bigamy and polygamy, whereas Islam allows up to 4 wives but only one husband. Judaism forbids sex for several days after menstruation. Christians were originally not allowed to remarry after a divorce, though it seems Jesus has been voted down on that one. And so on and on. And yes, it seems that a disproportionate number of religious taboos are about food and sex.

Looking back at history, many of the religious laws make sense. For instance, in the Middle East, pigs were vectors of a deadly parasite. In India, where people were mostly lactose tolerant, milk was an important food source for children; so keeping the cows alive was a priority. And random sexual intercourse is one of the most efficient ways ever found to spread diseases. There is a whole subgroup of diseases that are almost never spread any other way, these days simply called STD. They are still killing people by the millions, despite our advanced technology.

This raises a horrible theological dilemma: If a sin used to be harmful, but has been rendered harmless by technology, is it OK for the believers on their own to de-sinsitize it? Or should we wait for the deity to appear and dictate a correction to the Handbook of Life?

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For instance, until recently our species was rare. Life was usually short, many children never lived up to have children of their own, and small changes in the climate could almost empty an area of people. Today, genetic diversity seems secured for quite a while. In fact, packing too many people too tightly together is more of a problem. Does this mean that we should re-consider the sinfulness of, for instance, homosexuality?

And what about incest (among equals, for instance adult brother / sister)? In the past, horrible genetic damage might occur. Today, it is fairly cheap to have one's tubes tied off, so that no children will pop out at all. And considered that there are already enough people, society should probably be happy about it. Now, even consensual incest is rather icky to most people; but there is no need to make out on the lawn. The neighbors need not be bothered in the least. Is it still a bad thing, or is it OK now?

I say this depends on how you perceive the purpose of the commandments. The later so famous Jesus once said that the Sabbath was made for men, not men for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of Man was lord of the Sabbath. In light of this, it seems reasonable to assume that no religious law was ever made to benefit God. God was alive and well before he took the time to create mankind, or even the universe. He does not live in houses made by hands, and does not need any sacrifice from our hand. We can neither help him nor harm him, but we can please him by doing the things that promote peace and goodwill to all men. Only to our neighbor, another shard of pottery like ourselves, can we do good or evil.

As a corrective to this, we should remember that men's minds are easily clouded by pride and greed and lust. We may decide to deem something harmless because we want it, not because it is. This often happens with sex. A person who enjoys sexual intercourse as a kind of sport will unwittingly hurt the feelings of another, who regard it as a sacred act of sharing. The one who offends is unaware and even in retrospect unable to understand that he did anything wrong. If the conscience cannot be arbiter of truth, would it not be safer to listen to the Creator?

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Of course, some people do not believe in God the same way I do. Applying our standards of sin and virtue to them is meaningless. Just as I would not want to be judged by a Hindu for my occasional beefburger, I would not judge an unbeliever for things that do not obviously harm others. In fact, I couldn't care less about that. True religion comes from the inside and works its way out; imposing standards from the outside will help neither them nor me. There is enough bitterness and discord in the world as is.

But before you try to rewrite my religion, you should think at least as hard about it as I have. And I have been thinking a lot. This is all for today, though.