The War on Sin

One of the biggest fights of the next few decades will be the fight against sin. That is not the fight against sins and sinners but the fight against the entire concept of sin which has caused mankind so much unnecessary pain and grief.

Sin is one of those words which have a specifically religious meaning and are therefore often encountered spelt with capital letters. If I assault you, strike you a forceful blow intending to cause you pain or injury, it is clearly by any reasonable definition a crime and a sin. However it would be very unusual to see anybody treating it as a sinful act rather than a clear and obvious crime. The reason for that is that it is so clearly a crime with a clear victim. If an action has an obvious victim we see it clearly as a crime and such matters are handled without any involvement with God. An unprovoked physical attack is clearly none of God's business, it is instead a matter for the victim, the victim's friends and the civil authorities to deal with. The god who gets mentioned whenever something is mislaid, found, broken, served up to eat or found to be especially fine or inexplicable does not get involved in minor squabbles between adults. That is not to say that he approves of violence just that he knows we can work it out ourselves. The only guidance he gives is not to escalate things unnecessarily, the often entirely misunderstood admonition regarding an eye for an eye. Many people these days see this as an entirely illiberal notion that sanctions extreme punishments but that is a travesty, the concept really relates not to making punishments severe enough to fit the crime but entirely the other way around, ensuring that they are in proportion and not too severe. The temptation when your neighbour pokes out your brother's eye may be to roast the offender over a slow fire or kill him, all his household and their livestock (after all that is the Way of Yahweh the psychopath) the notion of an eye for an eye whilst rather nasty, especially when taken entirely literally at least stops endless waves of revenge and recrimination. Whilst literally putting out people's eyes is clearly barbaric if we interpret the scripture sensibly it suggests ensuring that the punishment is well matched to the crime and the loss suffered by the human victim. Clearly killing a man for blinding another man is not appropriate, and neither is a small fine, the punishment should be in proportion to the value of the eye, substantial but not excessive. A punishment which was sure, certain and thoroughly in proportion to the injury caused is the sort of punishment which is going to keep the peace and impress the tribe with the wisdom of the judge's decision, and minimize the chances of anybody feeling aggrieved afterwards which is as good as any justice scheme is ever likely to be. Theories of crime and punishment really begin to fall down when there is no obvious human injured third party. This is where the concept of sin comes in and causes so much human misery.

Sins are generally speaking victimless crimes and monotheistic gods can't get over them. Once you have created the idea of a god in heaven who sees everything all the time (except perhaps in his own garden) you have to envision him seeing stuff that isn't anybody else's business and you have to anticipate what his attitude to it would be.

The first deadly sin is of course masturbation. If you live in a world without an all-seeing god or in a world in which spirits are spending most of their time busy doing their own thing masturbation isn't really anybody else's business. But once you have called ceiling cat, the all-seeing eye in the sky, into existence then you have to face the issue. If you are doing something embarrassing you can't hide it from ceiling cat, he will see it and he must judge you for it. This is the invention of sin, an action which does not have a human victim but needs to be punished because it cannot be hidden from God. In a world without a monotheistic god sins don't really apply because different gods have different concerns and it is just too much of a brain-strain to imagine several gods simultaneously watching everybody all the time everywhere. A single god can get away with the everywhere at once trick but surely more than one god cannot be present everywhere at once because they would be living inside each other. Whilst it is possible to have victimless crimes classed as sins against a god under a multi-god system it is much easier to allow the gods not to notice or pay any attention to things such as masturbation, idleness, drunkenness or drug taking. Also by definition the gods in a multi-god system have to be able to share and not get so jealous and petty. While it is conceivable that gods can be everywhere at once no human could be expected to be paying attention to all the gods at the same time so they must get used to the idea of sharing and not being quite so pathologically jealous. When you have siblings you have to share, Yahweh is an only child and a bit of spoilt brat to boot, but that rather goes with the job description of only god.

If there is a single god and he watches everywhere and can also read your thoughts you have created the ultimate tyrant. In what many people believe to be the greatest dystopia ever envisioned, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother was watching you all the time and he needed to see that you loved him and hated his enemies. This is exactly what Yahweh does. There may be some murder, thievery and assault among the proles but the real crime, the really serious stuff is the crime which has the party and its leader as the only victim. Thoughtcrime and facecrime. These are crimes for which there is only one possible punishment, torture followed by destruction. It is not clear whether Big Brother really existed or whether he was a puppet of the inner party, not unlike the speculation regarding many communist leaders such as Kim Jong Il, in many ways it does not really matter, the idea of the leader existed and that is what counts, sins can have a referent even if the referent is dead or fictional as long as everybody acts as if the referent is real. A one true all powerful and all seeing god can create sins out of thin air by being the victim of victimless actions. Doubt is victimless, scepticism and cynicism are just ways the mind works until there is a body to embody, or at least represent the spirit of community endeavour. When causes have names and faces it becomes easier to motivate people into action. Crusades are well named, they were not just genocidal adventures, they were genocidal adventures in the name of Jesus and the cross. The cross symbolized the entire culture of Europe, or Christendom as it then was. The cross was the flag they pledged allegiance to, the cause their kings pledged themselves to as well, it was peace, justice and the medieval way. A monotheistic religion allows a monopoly of power to be created and to have a single focus: the Qur'an, the cross, Big Brother.

We have seen the dreadful power of monotheism in the crusades as all of Europe was focused on violence. The pope blessed the crusaders and forgave them all the sins they committed, and all the sins they were surely about to commit. That is weaponized faith. Today Christianity does not do such things. The war to end all wars did not end all wars, but it surely ended the era of Christian assertion and mindless expansionism. American separation of church and state has been a major boon for peace in the twentieth century as it has put beyond use the easiest excuse for war. In the twentieth century wars had to be justified in secular terms as defence of freedom rather than the expansion of Christian civilization as had been clearly used as the pretext (surely not the actual Realpolitik reason) for the expansion of European empires. Because America was (and hopefully will remain) a secular state all wars have at least had to be measured against a potentially objective scale of explanation and justification. Because Britain was a coalition of different Christian factions, as was Germany and France had developed a strong measure of secularism and anti-clericalism even the nineteenth century age of empire was not as thoroughly dominated by religion as had been the earlier centuries and the explicitly Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal. The absence of a single denominational empire in the nineteenth century probably saved several millions of lives. Just imagine for a few moments what would have happened if India had been over-run by a European imperial power lead by a general with the religious sensitivities of a sixteenth century Jesuit, no doubt his name would have become a by-word for savagery and carnage on a colossal scale. It is almost chance that saved the world from such a fate, but perhaps there is a degree of self-limiting on the evils that religion can do because of the potential for schism ensuring that no one denomination can take over the world and still remain psychotically fanatical. That may be a tendency but we would be unwise to conclude that it was some kind of iron law which prevents one brand of religion from dominating the entire world and ensuring that freedom will always have a few cracks to hunker down in. I hope that is true but we would be as well not to bet our entire civilization on it, there are plenty of religions who would have the drive to dominate the world and the whole of humanity in the name of fighting sin. Such people have no compunction at all when it comes to mass slaughter of infidels and enemies of God, they would with a cheerful song in their heart blow the entire planet to hell to save humanity from sin and think themselves virtuous for doing so. Nobody will so happily engage in mass slaughter as the man who knows he is doing so out of the highest possible motivation.

You don't need to demonstrate any loss or damage to declare an action to be a sin. If you have an only god you can create a sinful action just by declaring that your god finds it abominable. No justification is required. If the God of Abraham says anal sex is an abomination then it simply is, you don't have to explain why it is abominable to God or to describe or explain any injury. The same goes for menstruation, shellfish, pork, mixed fabrics and goat seethed in milk. God is described as jealous and judgemental so it is perfectly reasonable that bitter and twisted old men and perhaps a few old women get to decide what he is bitter and twisted about without ever having to explain why we should take notice. Isn't it really easy to imagine how a bitter and twisted old man can start making a list of things God hates? Sex outside marriage is an obvious one. The men who get to tell the tribe what God thinks are obviously going to be older and richer than the average, much more likely to be involved in the trading of women for advantage than young men, or any women. Sex as recreation or as a celebration of infatuation isn't big on old men's lists of virtues. Old men want certainty of paternity so they ensure that God is really interested in that too although why that would be a really important thing for a god is an idea that the old men thought never needed explaining. Adultery to the God of Abraham is defined as a man having sex with a fellow Jew's wife. The other fellow and the wife are guilty, while the wife can be let off if she can prove she was raped. Perhaps.

Jesus put an unusual twist on the standard Jewish teachings by declaring that divorce couldn't work, that if you make a promise before God that promise has to last for ever and therefore anybody who thinks he is divorced is actually an adulterer in the sight of God for ever. Whilst normally the Catholic Church has no problem with making up new dogma on the hoof on this matter they have actually been remarkably faithful to the teaching of Christ. There is absolutely no wiggle room whatsoever on this matter as far as I can see, if you declare that you are a Christian then you should believe that marriage lasts for ever and remarriage can only be possible after the death of a spouse, and being born again does not count! I think Muhammad got this one thing right, old Isa had gone astray here, this was not the voice of the god of powerful old men. Powerful old men sometimes want to divorce their wives, especially if some fool has gone and imported the alien (to the desert nomads at least) idea of monogamy. In the New Testament you will search in vain to find any recommendation or commandment to have but a single wife, and only a fool would expect there to be one in the Old Testament. Monogamy began to filter into the Jewish world slowly. It was a foreign idea. It was not supported by scripture or the histories of the Hebrew kings. It took its time to become accepted, it took about as long as bathing took to take off in England. The only references to monogamy in the Bible appear in Timothy (1 Timothy, Chapter 3), and this is in the form of advice to bishops and deacons of the church for the sake of appearances (so as not offend the more civilized Romans who had been monogamous for a thousand years before this) rather than an admonition for all Christians to limit themselves to a single wife. Much as they may try to show it that Christianity civilized the Roman Empire the reality is quite the opposite, Roman Law recognized and supported monogamy and Christians and their god had to just adapt to it. As Jesus had not thought to mention the subject one way or another the Christian Church simply adapted and pretended that God had always asked man to be monogamous just as God had always wanted man to use the Roman calendar, alphabet and language.

Muhammad took the cult of Abraham's god back to its roots, among desert-dwelling semi-nomads with aspirations toward city life and dreams of empire. Allah was Yahweh stripped of his concessions to Roman monogamy and with a renewed fascination with virginity, not as the ideal qualities of a mother to a mythical god-man but as the ideal qualities to be found in a wife. You can see clearly how the man's mind worked, for Allah the virginity of the prophet's wife was far more important than any minor issues such as the consent of the bride. Adultery was sinful so the prophet's wife must be completely innocent of it, at six years old that is a reasonable bet. I think it is unfair to suggest that Muhammad was a paedophile just because he took his bride's virginity at the age of nine (by the 13 month lunar calendar at least, she may have been nearer to 8 by our 12 month calendar). We could make that assumption if he had taken several child wives or divorced her when she became too old, but he did neither. What we can say about him is that his values are a long way from being our values, or from any values that are remotely civilized. These are the values that he painted as the values of his god. Allah was a jealous but randy god. He supported men having enjoyable sex but this absolutely had to be within marriages approved of by Muhammad, thus making female sexuality problematic. Much of Islam is about controlling women to ensure that they know their place, which is distinctly inferior while being heavily patronized. Women are not to be respected in practice and their freedom of choice must be severely limited but they are to be spoken of as if they are given the highest possible form of respect. Such two-faced attitudes were very common in the west and were expressed openly as recently as thirty years ago. Now such chauvinism is not acceptable in public, except of course among the proles who don't and never will count.

Why are drugs illegal?
	BECAUSE THEY KILL PEOPLE

Drugs are illegal because they kill people. Wrong.

Alcohol and cigarettes kill people and are legal. Drugs are illegal because taking drugs is regarded as a sin.

If there was a new process which was discovered to make cannabis entirely safe to consume, which eliminated all its side effects completely can you imagine that this would make any difference at all in the attitudes of religious people towards it? It is not the side effects that the religious don't like, it is the main effect, religious people don't want anybody taking any substance which gives an effect which is in any way comparable to religious ecstasy.

Drugs are illegal not because they cause misery but because they cause joy. Religion is not in the business of killing misery, it seeks out joy to kill. Religious people are jealous of anybody enjoying themselves on their own. All joys must be enjoyed through religion. That's why they built the creation museums to put animatronics dinosaurs in because no little boy should be having fun playing with dinosaurs unless he's thinking about Jesus while he does it. Think about it. They put a religious service and God in front of sex, although it took them a thousand years before they actually made marriage a Christian sacrament. They also expect you to pray to thank God before you eat. They either put wine on the church altar or they don't want you to drink it at all. Nothing good in life is immune from the dog of religion taking a piss up it. That's what religion does, it either marks something as its own (marriage, food, pleasant scenery, fluffy animals, good things happening, not quite the worst thing happening, law, justice, America etc.) or it marks it as thoroughly disgusting and evil in every way.

Not every religion looks upon drugs as sinful. Rastafarianism goes the other way. Just as the Jews and Christians were so into wine the suggestion that they eschew it (like Methodists and Muslims) would have been very difficult. Rastafarianism embraced the taking of cannabis and turned it from something sinful into a holy sacrament. There can be no half measures with drugs. No religion is ambivalent, they either see drugs and/or alcohol as evil, a sin, a mark of moral weakness and a scourge upon the poor and indolent or they are a sacrament to the religion and a way to see deeper into the mind of men or the gods. Of course without the distorting mirror of religion we can look upon mind-altering drugs with some semblance of balance and reason and say that they are both wrong. Drugs are neither the way to fulfillment nor the inevitable road to ruin. Addiction is a bad thing, and so more of a bad thing if the thing you are addicted to is made hugely expensive by the misguided efforts of people who regard all forms of human pleasure as either natural, wholesome and God-given or deeply sinful.

The War on Drugs

Most of the harm caused by drugs in the world today is caused by the war on drugs. No other commodity offers anything like the profit margins that the drug trade offers. No legitimate product would be grown on secret farms in war-zones and then exported on the insides of airline passengers to be sold on the worst streets in town by nasty little toerags protected by patrolling armed guards. Not even lucky white heather. The peculiar marketing methods are all caused by the illegal status of the product, as were the peculiar distribution methods of the prohibition era. These days Canadian Club and Bacardi does not enter the US in the same way it did in the prohibition era. Legitimate businesses can use legitimate means of distribution and they don't have to out-source their policing to armed thugs. If drugs were not illegal they would be considerably cheaper because distribution costs would be much lower and there would be genuine free market competition. Cheaper drugs would be considerably less glamorous and exclusive when available to all, even those who look like police officers. Cheaper drugs would not require people to give up work and take to crime, even addicts can hold down jobs when their drugs are ubiquitous and relatively cheap, just look at cigarette smokers, they manage to do it.

Of course many people hold their hands up in horror at the thought of legalized drugs because they are wedded to the notion that drugs are sinful, even if they are embarrassed by that thought and try to hide the true reasons for their disgust behind a smokescreen. But if we think about this logically for a few moments we should come to recognize that not everything that is not against the law is actually compulsory. There are many things which I regard as wrong and I would be happy to see disappear that I do not seek to make illegal, many of them because I know any attempt to ban them would create more harm than good. If there was never another hip-hop record made I would not grieve but I recognize that attempting to ban it would make hip-hop culture almost ubiquitous and would undermine the credibility of the state.

Americans in the twentieth century conducted “the noble experiment” of alcohol prohibition. It didn't work. Alcohol consumption did not go down, alcohol related problems did not go away and there were thousands of people turned into criminals by the process. The war on drugs is motivated by the same pattern of thinking, the concept of sin. The war on drugs is not working. The prisons of the world are filled with low level criminals, many people have had their lives blighted by convictions for entirely trivial offences against other people's ill-thought-out morals. And for what? Drugs are freely available in large quantities and relatively stable prices throughout the world. More people can get cannabis if they want it than can have access to reliable broadband. It is time to declare an end to the war on drugs and fight instead the whole notion of sin.

Gambling

Why do the religious object to gambling? Of course they say it's all about the misery caused by losing but is that really the case? Far more misery is caused in this world by the Catholic Church's refusal to let unhappy couples dissolve their loveless marriages and by the birth of unwanted children the Church refuses to be aborted when they have the size and cerebral complexity of prawns. Misery is a blessing from God they claim. No. The reason that gambling is regarded by so many religious people as being a sin is that winning is a source of ecstasy, and it is not an ecstasy they feel comfortable with assigning to their God, and ungodly ecstasy must be sinful. There are enough unfair lotteries in life with genetic diseases and inherited wealth and multiple disadvantage without adding anything to the mountain of unfairness that has to be explained by the mysterious ways of the Lord. It is easier to say that gambling is a sin and the turn of a card or the placing of a horse is not something God gets involved with.

Fornication

What exactly is fornication? If you read the Old Testament with an open mind you will clearly see that the Hebrews had a slightly healthier attitude to sex than that of many modern Christians. While the work is full of disparaging references to harlots and whores it is also clear that their trade was not in any sense against the Law of Moses. Neither was it against that law for a man to have sex with a woman who was not his wife. It was only a sin if the woman he had sex with was the wife of another man or a close relative. And as usual man in this context means an adult member of his own Hebrew tribe. A man could have sex with any woman if he owned her as a slave. Sex was much more about property rights than it was about legitimizing sexuality. A man owned his wife and could have sex with her whenever he wanted. This is still the teaching of Islam and many Christian churches to this day. Indeed it was the law of England until 1991 (two years after my own marriage) that a man could not be prosecuted for raping his wife as an open-ended commitment to have sex on demand was assumed to be part of the contract of marriage (established by an academic review of the law dating back to 1736). That is thoroughly barbaric. How often is this taught as one of the good things that religion has brought society? There is nothing within any of the holy books which gives women the basic right to assert her own authority over her own body, to the everlasting shame of all Men of God.

Spousal rape was recognized by the United Nations as a violation of human rights in 1993. One human committee decision embarrassed the majority of the world's religious teachers.

The God of Abraham has been an accessory to rape and abuse for thousands of years while at the same time condemning as sinners people who express their love for each other outside the narrow confines of a marriage approved of by God.

Is promiscuity really harmful?

Obviously promiscuity increases the chances of spreading venereal diseases and so it is not simply a matter of solely private concern but in and of itself there is no obvious and inevitable harm to be caused by promiscuity. It is part of our human nature to want more than one sexual partner while at the same time wanting our partners to be faithful to us. Sexual jealousy is, in the absence of a war on drugs, by far the biggest cause of murder in our species. For that reason if for no other we cannot move promiscuity and sexual freedom from the column of sin and put it instead in the column marked “Good Things”, but how much in life can we say is 100% good with no downside and no caveats? Even motherhood and apple pie can be overdone or inappropriate at times. The way I see it there is no fundamental problem with casual or meaningless sex as long as everybody engaged in it understands it in a similar way. Of course there can be hurtful actions in regard to sex, but there is always a human victim. There is no such thing as sinful sex, only abusive sex. If there is no lying or cheating going on then it is just a consensual human exchange. It is not necessary for both (or however many) parties to all get the same thing or the same amount of benefit out of the exchange for it to be legitimate. Having sex can be mutually pleasurable, tolerable, a tad one-sided or downright abusive in just the same way as can a conversation or a purchase. While it is good to come away feeling both fully satisfied yourself and that whoever you have been dealing with is also fully satisfied most of us settle for not getting shafted, unless that's the bag we're into.

The Sin of Onan

The Sin of Onan in the Bible was not masturbation, it was refusing to impregnate his wife, the widow of his brother. If a man is married in the eyes of God he should have full sex with his wife and not refuse to impregnate her. There is no sin in letting his seed fall on the ground, after all before the invention of female underwear a large portion of seed would have dribbled its way onto the ground in any case, the sin was in refusing to put his seed in the intended receptacle, not treating his wife correctly. A wife should always be the potential bearer of a man's children, if she is not he may not treat her correctly, at least that was their thinking. Letting your seed fall on the ground is acceptable for slave women, not for respectable wives.

The Christian attitude to masturbation is much more clearly explained by the notion of sin and a jealous god who resents any human pleasure that he is not explicitly thanked for. The message of St Paul was clear, marriage was a good thing only in that it was preferable to burning in hell for the unavoidable sins of fornication:

But if they cannot contain, let them marry:

for it is better to marry than to burn. [1 Corinthians chapter 7 verse 9]

Perhaps if some great reformer such as Luther, Calvin or Wesley had put his mind to it masturbation could have evolved into a Christian sacrament, a sincere way to call upon God and get closer to heaven. Up to now Christians have always prayed with their hands where God can see them. There is perhaps still time for this change to happen. The world still awaits the coming of the Lord.

Atheism \| Politics \| Life \| Feedback \| Email \| Search \| Forum \| Blog \| Home
Tweet	© 1999 - 2011 by Martin Willett.	mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited

The War on Sin

Why are drugs illegal?

BECAUSE THEY KILL PEOPLE