Sin

Sin!

A simple word, isn't it? 'Paap' in hindi.
Well, what does it mean? If we think about it for a moment. We are suddenly caught off-guard. When i posed this questions to a few people, the reaction was quite late and when it did come it was sort of inhibited. The general consensus was doing anything with the knowledge that it is wrong results in sin. So, what is sin to one might not be a sin to the other. I might do something 'wrong' without knowledge. So i have not sinned. Also if in my knowledge the thing is not wrong, I haven't sinned. But shouldn't sin be something more definite. Like adultery should be a sin for everybody. Stealing, taking that which is not yours by right, should be a sin. Whether in my mind i accept it as wrong or not, it should be a sin.



Here are a few attempts at defining sin.

Sin - The breaking of one of the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament of the Bible, but later included any non-adherence to the teachings of the Christian Churches. (What was a sin for one was not, necessarily, a sin for the other.)

www.saburchill.com/history/hist003

estrangement from god

an act that is regarded by theologians as a transgression of God's will

sine: ratio of the opposite side to the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle

(Akkadian) god of the moon; counterpart of Sumerian Nanna

commit a sin; violate a law of God or a moral law

the 21st letter of the Hebrew alphabet

violent and excited activity; "they began to fight like sin"

commit a faux pas or a fault or make a serious mistake; "I blundered during the job interview"

• 
  

wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Sin was the name of the lunar god in Babylonia and Assyria. He was also known as Nanna, the "illuminer."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_(god)

Are we really afraid of sinning? Why? I believe any person some sort of theological belief is afraid of committing sin. Do we really believe in an afterlife? Or another birth? Judgement Day?

Those are concepts we might accept or agree to or even imagine as being true...but do we really know? No. We do not know. Some might accept it. Some might now. But we don't know. We have only been told about these things by people who wanted to exercise some or the other sort of control over other people and wanted them to behave in a certain due n number of reasons.

Even People who do not believe in any kind of God, would not want to do something with the express knowledge of it being wrong. So what stops them from doing so? To me, the thing that stops anyone from 'sinning' is not some fatwa or religious dictat or gita vani, it's the conscience. Human mind is incapable of doing somethig 'wrong'. Uunder duress or temptation of a better future we might agree or accept to 'sin'. But in normal course we cannot.

An interesting view is given in the online catholic encycolpedia. A moral evil!

They divide sin into three categories -

1. Material and Formal Sin - An action which, as a matter of fact, is contrary to the Divine law but is not known to be such by the agent constitutes a material sin; whereas formal sin is committed when the agent freely transgresses the law as shown him by his conscience, whether such law really exists or is only thought to exist by him who acts.
2. Internal Sins - Three kinds of internal sin are usually distinguished:

• delectatio morosa, i.e. the pleasure taken in a sinful thought or imagination even without desiring it;

• gaudium, i.e. dwelling with complacency on sins already committed; and

• desiderium, i.e. the desire for what is sinful.

3. The Capital Sins or Vice - "a capital vice is that which has an exceedingly desirable end so that in his desire for it a man goes on to the commission of many sins all of which are said to originate in that vice as their chief source".

The worst thing about the article is that it defines sin as any " thought, word or deed". How can you ever indict anybody for a thought? Is it a sin to covet? Is it a sin to hate? I mean those are such natural and harmless feelings...

I guess it's upto one and each to decide what's a sin and what's not.

"Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes Sin's a pleasure".
- Lord Byron