What Comes Next After Sin?

Improvement is a simple, natural impulse -- everyone wants to see a better life for his family and society. But when you add the ingredient of sin, improvement becomes clouded. Is it an improvement to deny women education and health care, to dictate what they wear in public, and to regard them as inferior beings? To the Taliban and the clerics in Iran, those ideas are considered steps on the road to an Islamic paradise. But every society dominated by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has had to struggle with the notion of sinfulness. The supposed sinfulness of women, as many Muslims see it, is that the mere sight of a woman inflames sexual passion and arouses temptation, thus pulling men away from God.

A woman who walks bare-headed through the streets of most Islamic countries would be considered sinful, but before we shake our heads, consider Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter," in which the sinful heroine, Hester Prynne, must run into the forest to take off her cap and unloose her hair in the sun. Also consider that conservative politics in this country are largely based on the notion that human being are not improvable, that without harsh opposition to free thinking and liberal sexual mores, not to mention a massive military and police force, human depravity would run amok.

Sin isn't a fact of human nature. It's an idea. As such, it has proved very useful to religious and political elites. The current repression exacted by the Iranian mullahs may be in the name of God, but the clerical elite in that country are immensely wealthy and corrupt. In this country, hellfire fundamentalist preachers grow rich, and many feel free to pursue personal corruption shielded by their prestige and money. Getting past the idea of sin is difficult when the myth is fostered that God hates sinners and favors the righteous. Who wouldn't want to be on the winning team, where all the power and money lie, not to mention the grand prize of salvation?

It would benefit the world as a whole if every society could move past the toxic idea of sin to a new idea. There's no lack of alternatives. Human nature is as capable of love, tolerance, rationality, and spiritual yearning as it is of sin. Psychotherapy was a nonreligious movement that attempted to deal with sin's fundamental forces -- aggression, sex, guilt, and shame -- by examining the psyche and ridding it of conflict, by bringing the darkness of the unconscious to light. The average person doesn't take advantage of psychotherapy, certainly not the kind that goes inward for self-knowledge, yet the general idea of bringing darkness to light holds good. It underlies liberal politics, reformist religion, secular tolerance, and spiritual seeking.

As a body of ideas, those movements have more to offer the future than the reactionary idea of sin. I feel optimistic about the ongoing campaign against sin-based ideologies (which don't have to be religious; police states like the former Soviet Union were completely secular but based on the necessity of repressing freedom), and optimism is needed in the light of recent events in Iran, where the religious reactionaries have clamped down, as well as Israel, where a kindred form of religious reaction grows bolder. The next idea after sin is being born, and despite the fact that sin holds sway over millions of minds, those minds can free themselves whenever they wish.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

Comments

[gwensgal]

sin is the violation of moral and ethical boundaries which result in human loss, degradation, and suffering. sin is not nonsense; its reality is proven everyday in the very real consequences people suffer on both individual and collective bases.

[LordMoon]

Sin, is acting unconsciously, without any consciousness of what you are doing. To be fully conscious, is to live without sin.

The story of mankind is the story of consciousness, the struggle against blindness, and thought coverings.

Religion has a long history of supressing sexuality, as a way of controlling people.

[Ed and Deb Shapiro - Huffpost Blogger]

Hi Deepak, Deb and I were just with your lovely daughter Mallika at LOHAS

For me sin is:

S - Self

I - Inflicted

N - Nonsense

Joyfully,

Ed

[LifeChangeStartsNow]

Deepak Chopra, thank you for that message. My well-meaning mother tried brainwashing me with this idea of sin that she could never explain except by referring back to her bible. And since I could never stop asking "why" and her answers never made sense, by the time I was 7 I knew it was bogus.

I'm 50 now and still find the idea bizarre.

You're absolutely right about psychotherapy as well. It's after a suicidal depression and a year of thrice-weekly sessions that my life completely changed because I had changed and saw the world in a completely new light. It was the best thing that ever happened to me!

I intend to keep the light shining.

[GrainOSand]

Sin is a choice to act against a loving nature. There can be no good without evil. All that is left to the individual is the choice of good or evil. It was always telling that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the forbidden tree. Those who choose evil in whatever scenario are burdened somehow and the committed sin is only a symptom of that deeper burden. Some say the tree of knowledge of good and evil translates to the tree of knowledge of all. If I consider that I arrive at, "One cannot know good without evil." Therefore bliss may be ignorance of either extreme and adherence to ones pure nature...untouched by earthly experience. Oh...how long the journey back to original self through the layers of knowledge of good and evil.

Here is a practical application of this concept. Because I grow happy when I win I thereby am made susceptible to grow sad when I lose, but if I were unchanged in emotion, no matter outcome...then all that is left is appreciation of the opportunity to play the game. If I am towards fairness with no desire, if I am towards love with no thought of reciprocation, if I am towards contentment and serenity with no longing, perhaps I win or perhaps I lose, but these by-products of being do nothing to obscure how I played the game or the fact that the opportunity to play is a blessing.

[Conk]

Careful, you are flirting with the dualism of good vs. evil. There is love and there is the absence of love. No light and dark, just light and absence of light.

A baby knows the goodness and love of it's mother without knowing evil.