Mom, I apologize. I don’t know what happened. I promise you, Mother, I did the best I could. I tried my hardest. I did everything I could and I was still a good boy. I just couldn’t be bad.
By self-destructive do you mean pulling us farther away from God?
Suppose I decide to murder someone but I only do it once just to see what it feels like and plan it so I won’t get caught.
That is not a habit and not self-destructive if I’m a sociopath and feel no guilt or remorse. How is murdering someone sin under the rubric of “self destructive habit?”
Vinnie
Unless you do drugs ,or youre an alcoholic or smoke there is no such things as desctructive habits.
Come on guys… I explained what I meant above already.
No. God is omnipresent. So that sounds incoherent to me. Unless you speak of distance in some unspecified abstract sense like perhaps some measure of your similarity to God… if so then since God is infinite, the only way to be less like God is to be simply less… less aware, less free, less potential, less ability, etc…
Why? Do you always do things just to see what they feel like? That sounds like a bad habit to me.
It has to do with the meaning of the word “murder.” There are lots of different reasons for taking a person life. Some are good reasons and some are not good reasons. We use the word murder when the reasons are not good. It is not the result that makes something a sin.
Why Nick you sound like a materialist… as if your physical body is all that you are and the health of that body is the only measure of your well being.
When Jesus said, “I came that you may have life and have it more abundantly,” did you understand that to mean that Jesus came so that people would have longer life spans?
The well beign of your material body brings everything in order. By taking care of your body you take care of your soul.
Answer me this. When you are having intercourse out of marriage is it a destructive behaviour? Jesus think it is. Tell me doesnt your body feel good after this? Your dopamine receptors ( your brain as a whole to be honest) is designed to give you a “reward” effect after that. So why would it be a destructive behaviour? And thats only one example.Ive come to terms that what we call sin sometimes it doesnt fit with any scientific research about the human body.
If something makes you feel good do it. That will make your lifespan happier. As for the next life ,well since we aint so sure i guess repent and hope for the best
I meant in a relational sense. You can fee distant or alienated from someone in a relationship.
Clever but being curious, trying new things and exploring the world and yourself is a bad habit?
What do good and bad reasons have to do with personal “self destructive habits”? Is doing something for bad reasons a sin? And what do you mean by “bad” reasons? Hitler had “good” reasons for doing what he did in his own mind. How is that obvious sin a self-destructive habit in your view?
I’m just asking questions to get a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of your view. It doesn’t seem to be a complete theology of sin or encompass many bad acts which may not necessarily be self destructive or habitual.
Vinnie
LOL And I am reminded of Jesus when He says, “man shall not live by bread alone,” and yes eating activates your dopamine receptors too. I don’t know about whatever you think “soul” means but no, taking care of your physical body is far from sufficient to take care of your spiritual body.
LOL You are talking to someone who grew up in the most extreme liberal environment founded on the ideas of free love. I know first hand that it does not work. Yes, it is self-destructive. Everything you build in your relationship, like trust, with one woman is torn apart by your playing with another. This happens even when the woman believes and agrees with the ideas of free love. Is this not exactly what we see in every drama and real life situation where this happens?
Incorrect, even you acknowledge that drug abuse is self-destructive and apparently that feels really good to many people.
Yeah well, I don’t believe in this god of the Pharisees also believed in by Pharisaical Christians who supposedly cannot associate with sinners. And I am also reminded of that poem about the footprints in the sand.
But yes, if things damage our relationship with the source of eternal life then it would seem rather obvious to me that these are self-destructive. I am not going to accept the dictates of some theologian on this matter, but there are things like blaming God for your own mistakes where I can see good reason why this can be damaging to your relationship with God. But just because somebody says something will piss God off, no I am not buying that sort of manipulative rhetoric.
Like I have demonstrated, these reasons are the difference between protection and murder, among other things. And like I have said many time already, the most self-destructive habits are habits of thought. The reasons behind our actions are most most significant part of our actions for that is where you find what those actions mean to us. I am a virtue ethicist not a consequentialist.
Now you are playing upon the ambiguity of language. Using “good reasons” in a sense which simply means that He felt justified, but the vast majority of people will not agree that they were good reasons. Do you need me to explain how such things are self-destructive? What he did was a denial of the value of everything he had in common with the people he treated like vermin to be exterminated. When you do that the same elements in your own life be comes shallow, hollow, and inconsistent.
I have no intension of including or encompassing the things made up by people using religion as a tool of power to lord it over others. If it is not self-destructive then it is not sin. But of course you have to have a bigger picture of the self than the materialist one Nick has been using in his criticisms, equating the self with the physical body alone. There is also the mind and the spirit. The inconsistencies of the reasons and ideas in the mind are self-destructive of the life of the mind, and yes things which damage your relationship with God will negatively affect the life of the spirit.
No arguments though only your thoughts on this
Has nothing to do with pre-marital intercourse but ok
Most people ive met and know 9and i think this implies for anyone)dont do drugs because they like it .There are underlying issues which leads them there Its stupid .Like if you tell someone do something that its gonna get you killed and theyll do it.
Well the social conventions and legalities of marital contracts has often had very little to do with the actual relationship between the man and the woman, and I am am very skeptical about the significance of them for sin. For some cultures the sexual relationship was the marriage ceremony. The real significance is found in the motivations for the sexual relationship.
These days, the man has very little to gain in the marriage contract, and it is little wonder that people now have long term relationships without those pieces of paper.
Sounds like a really bad habit to me.
So you just erased your view above ?
Because what i get from this
is that pre-marital relationships are not destructive(hense sex)
Yeap it is.But no one does it because “it feels good”
Then you were not paying attention.
The issue was the identification of sin with self-destructive habits.
You said you couldn’t see why pre-marital relationships are self-destructive.
And I replied that I couldn’t see why pre-marital relationships are necessarily sinful.
Instead, I explained it is about the motivations of the sexual relationship which affect whether they build life-affirming relationships or they damage or tear down (the possibility of) life-affirming relationships. Sexual relationships are potent and indulging in them for the wrong reasons very quickly makes people callous, cynical, and loveless. The more you use people and treat them as meat and the harder it becomes to see them (as well as yourself) as anything else.
Sin is an addiction, even if it is something that seems good like classical music.
Why? Because an addiction destroys one’s freedom and independence and gives it to something or someone else. Just like hate destroys our independence and freedom…
Love on the other hand gives us freedom to think and to choose. It is freedom from sin, but not freedom from error. If you have not done so, please read my essay, God and Freedom on Academia.edu
I have a question for you Roger. If you are correct that sin is an addiction because an addiction destroys the addict’s freedom, how can the addict be responsible for engaging in the addiction? He has no freedom. He cannot free himself from the addiction if it has removed his capacity to choose, no?
A thought proposal:
Slavery is not only being owned by a person. Slavery is far more than that isn’t it? He said they who commit sin are slaves, too, didn’t He? IOW, someone might own me, legally, but nothing owns me in reality if I am not in bondage to sin. Most people are not owned by others legally, but most people are slaves, I think.
@Ralphie, good question.
In a sense sin takes away our ability to act, but it does not take away our ability to think. Victims of human slavery are not a sinners if they are made free in Christ. They are free to think, even if their freedom to act is limited. The fact is that the slaveholders are the ones addicted to slavery, not the slaves.
Everyone has the freedom to say No to addiction and sin. That is what we mean when we use the old fashioned word “Repent.” The problem is that I cannot break the power of sin and addiction using my own determination, because my integrity has been compromised. The only way for me restore my integrity and become whole is to turn to Jesus and accept His forgiveness and the Love of the Holy Spirit as the foundation of our lives.
Legalism is slavery. It is telling us what to do even if it is right. Love or grace is freedom even as it lets us know that actions have consequences.
Way too many people today who are not black are enslaved to legalism, are addicted “white privilege,” and think that they cannot change even though they should be able to see that this path leads in the wrong direction. Jesus Saves, not D. T.
1 Like
An addiction colors my thinking. Addiction tells me I am not addicted. They call it “denial” and it is a symptom of a disease, a disease called addiction. It is a physical, mental and spiritual “illness” that makes it impossible to sin! The addicted are too sick to sin. They cannot stop and they are blind to the very addiction that controls them.
I am taking this side of an argument for the sake of discussion.
In regards to the OP, my own view is that everything Jesus did, He did as a man - a man in perfect relationship with the Father. Per Paul, He laid aside His attributes as God and did everything through the Spirit being in perfect relationship with the Father. Therefore, as a man, He could have ‘felt’ the withdrawal of the Spirit from Him while on the cross when the Father associated Him with sin in conjunction with His sacrifice. Part of the incarnation was to live as we are intended to live and to demonstrate how a spirit-filled life can manifest itself.
I’m guessing you don’t know much about the Pharisees besides the caricatures you read of them in the Gospels. I never said God could not look upon sin. I am not an advocate of penal substation. We are sinners. I said our relationship with God becomes strained. This may be all on our end or it may not. I honestly don’t know. You are reading way too much into that statement.
No one has to accept any dictates of any theologian. And yea, just because people claim God detests homosexuality do we have to buy into it? Of course not. I’m not buying into manipulative rhetoric either. I can pretend I live in the 1800s in the south and use the Bible to make a hell of a case justifying slavery. We are not taking about what actions others tell you are wrong or sinful, but what sin itself is genetically defined as.
Self-destructive habits are sin. You get that right. Anything threatening our relationship with God is a sin. But there are a lot of things people did that were not self-destructive. Owning slaves in the 1800s, for example. It was great for the slave owners. They were able to grow things and they had cheap labor allowing their family to prosper. They went to church, loved Jesus and slept very well at night. Pious, slave-owning Christians. Sin doesn’t make the cut here. Your definition is just weak when look at the totality of things we probably all commonly agree are wrong/immoral/sinful.
Sin is an action contrary to the will of God and God is love as expressed in Jesus Christ.
Exactly. It lies in our free will choices. Without free will sin is impossible. A hailstone doesn’t sin when it bops you on the head and more than a bullet entering a person’s body does.
Self destructive habits and our thoughts are absolutely where sin festers. “Self-destructive” habits is too narrow a definition, however. I believe a self-destructive habit is contrary to the will of God as is owning slaves (despite the Bible) and hurting others for personal gain. All of these things also distance you from God and a life properly grounded in his will—whatever that may be.
Vinnie
Slavery was prosperous and a divine, God given right to many people who thrived off of it. It’s not about using things made up by people. Your definition is too narrow.
Vinnie
I’m guessing you don’t know much about the Pharisees, or you might know this is the one thing about them which the gospels got right. How do I know? My OT professor at seminary was a Jewish rabbi, and according to him this was the one difference between the teachings of Jesus and the Pharisees (i.e. rabbinical Judaism), WHICH happens to be a difference (from rabbinical/Pharisaical Judaism) shared by Hassidic Judaism. But by all means why don’t you share your impressions and your source for them.
I knew that. Not everything I say is about you. This was by way of explaining that my use of self-destructive was not according to your suggestion a matter of relational distance in that sense. You are reading way too much into my statement.
But I am saying more than that. I am saying the reverse. That all sins are self-destructive habits.
And I explained why I object to this. It is pretext for people to use religion as a tool of power and manipulation by saying that some things tick God off. Suppose I told a child that anything threatening his relationship with his parents is a sin? What would you think of that? It is not good because the relationship with your parents is simply not that fragile. So while this is technically true, it also not helpful, and even dangerously misleading.
I don’t think so. I think it is spot on and a guard against the misuse of religion.
Your argument from authority (one professor) is silly. There are countless seminary professors in the field of Christianity and Judaism that tout contradictory views, and some that are extremely naive and out of touch with the academic world. My sources are not just taking the word of one professor (because he was a Jewish Rabbi 2,000 years later). Do you just take the word of an Priest on what the New Testament teaches as beyond reproach? Instead I actually read the arguments of well respected and published scholars like Paula Fredriksen (Jesus of Nazareth), E.P. Sanders (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Jesus and Judaism, The Historical Figures of Jesus), John Meier (Marginal vol 3: Companions and Competitors 289-388 on the Pharisees ) and a bunch of other historical Jesus scholars who all comment heavily on the controversy narratives.
Your professor may be a very reputable and knowledgeable scholar. Certainly knows a lot more about historical Judaism than I do and as Sanders wrote: “The equation of Pharisees and Rabbis is by no means unique to Christian scholars, however, but has also been made by many prominent Jewish scholars.” But this issue is not settled. It is extremely difficult and controversial to reconstructs the Pharisee’s beliefs pre-Temple destruction. The literature is sparse and scholars go round and round in circles. Extending Rabinnic literature, which is often immensely difficult to date, to pre-70 Judaism is fraught with many difficulties. The controversy narratives in the gospel accounts tend to be caricatures as well and make reconstructing Jewish groups based off of them difficult.
As Paula Fredriksen wrote, “Mark shapes these controversy traditions polemically, to provide the greatest contrast between Jesus and his challengers. The scribes and Pharisees fuss over imagined Sabbath infringements (in fact, none is actually presented; it is the tone of Jesus’ activity that offends), oblivious to the splendid healings; miffed by a question and a miracle, they plot his murder. In their anxiety to ensure universal conformity to their own standards of observance, they follow Jesus everywhere, watching his house to see whom he eats with and how (Mark 2:13-17 and parr.), patrolling grainfields on the Sabbath hoping to catch him out (2:23-24), checking to see whether his disciples first wash their hands before eating (7:2). This is polemical caricature, not realistic portraiture.” Jesus of Nazareth pp. 107-108
Also on 108 over food laws: Mark dismisses the concerns of Jesus’ opponents-Shabbat, food, tithing, Temple offering, purity-as the “traditions of men.” To these he opposes what Jesus ostensibly propounds as “the commandments of God” (7:8). The strong rhetoric masks the fact that these laws are biblical and, as such, the common concern of all religious Jews: It is God in the Torah, not the Pharisees in their interpretations of it, who commanded these observances . . . [but] Mark writes after 70 C.E., in a period when many of the cultic purity laws were simply moot, because the Temple was no more. Few things could be safer than having his main character, whose predictions of the Temple’s destruction he dramatically showcased in his Gospel, proclaim that temple ritual was not essential to true piety."
And Christians have falsely caricatured Judaism as legalistic for two millennia: . A little dated but as Sanders wrote in Paul and Palestinian Judaism, “The frequent Christian charge against Judaism, it must be recalled, is not that some individual Jews misunderstood, misapplied or abused their religion, but that Judaism necessarily tends toward petty legalism, self-serving and self-deceiving casuistry, and a mixture of arrogance and a lack of confidence in God. But the surviving Jewish literature is as free of these characteristics as any I have ever read. By consistently maintaining the basic framework of covenantal nomism, the gift and demand of God were kept in a healthy relationship with each other, the minutiae of the law were observed on the basis of the large principles of religion and because of commitment to God, and humility before the God who chose and would ultimately redeem Israel was encouraged.”
This same God Jesus called Father. If you really want to know about the Pharisees, or any of Jesus’ “Companions and Competitors”, get volume 3 of Meier’s Marginal Jew Series. His history and research is impeccable. Half of his books are footnotes filled with references to other scholar’s views.
Vinnie
Ah!!! I see so you just assumed from the other things which might give an inaccurate understanding of Pharisaical Judaism that everything in the gospels about them must be wrong. Well yeah that is consistent with the overall dismissive attitude you seem to have about the gospels and the Bible.
1 Like