Sin: A Higher Cost

I've been thinking a lot about sin. What is sin? What is the damage it causes? Are the 10 commandments really a viable set of laws for our time? How should we interpret sin in our times? What are the things that God would really consider sinful?

Yes, these are a lot of questions. Where did this line of thinking come from? It came from being hurt recently by someone close to me, from someone whom I would never have expected this kind of damaging act. I am not considering murder or rape out of the category of sin - there is no doubt the wakes those acts leave in their paths are horrible and I would never question the pain they could cause. I am much more concerned with more subtle and slow-acting sins such as lying, cheating, and perhaps even stealing.

You may wonder, why be so concerned with lying, cheating and stealing? Sure they're bad, but everyone tells a little white lie every now and then. There's no harm in that! I'm going to do something I abhor, I am going to come out in a fairly absolute way on this. If you think a little white lie does no harm, you are wrong. Denying truth is a slow thing. If you allow one thing to pass, soon others will.

I am not arguing that if your mother comes home with a terrible hair cut you should bash it in a harsh manner. Rather, say something like "I'm glad that you like it. It's always good to try something new." This is not a lie. It also does not make your mother feel badly about her new cut. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean she doesn't, and your blatant dislike could turn her feelings off of the style which would be a disaster.

No, I'm not talking about those kinds of things. It's little lies that do the most damage. They make it possible for you to tell large ones. Pretty soon you begin to live in your own fantasy world, concocted in your own mind through a web of lies which have no basis in reality. The worst thing is not just that you are damaging yourself, but you are also damaging your relationships when you lie to others. When you tell a lie, you are causing a breach in trust, whether the person you tell knows it is a lie or not. You felt you needed to keep something from them, out of fear or some other negative feeling.

Get over it. Bite the bullet and tell them the truth. You maintain your relationship, or at least you are respected for coming clean. I am not saying you need to tell every person everything - that would be social suicide and could potentially ruin many a relationship (romantic, familial, or friend). Still, lying, the pain it causes and the mess it brings both communally and individually is heart-wrenching. It's a sin.

What about cheating? Really, cheating is a different kind of lying. It is trying to short change the system - finding some kind of short-cut out of ill-gotten means. Exploitation is a kind of cheating. What else is looking at someone's paper but exploitation of the other person's work? It causes dependency in you, and potentially ruins your reputation as well as makes them feel underappreciated.

This is not to say if you find a better way of doing something which is more efficient and just as positive you shouldn't do it. If I could remove half of all bureaucracy, I would. That would increase flow in countless organizations, and by no means is cheating, rather people would benefit all across the board. Cheating can be as small as looking at someone else's answers, or as big as sweat shop labor to cut labor costs in a transnational corporation. The damage it causes to a community and to individuals is catastrophic. That is a sin.

Stealing. I think fewer people would contest that stealing is a sin. Even lying and cheating are both more socially acceptable than stealing. Perhaps it is our American sensibility when it comes to issues of private property that makes stealing such an easy element to categorize as sin. However, now more than ever, it becomes easier to 'steal' information. Intellect has become a prized comodity. For some reason, perhaps it is because I am of a bridge generation (just on the border of X and Y), I do not find stealing of things on the internet to be as bad as stealing a concrete material. I DO, however, find plagarism to be appalling (probably because there is the potential of me to fall victim to this as I am a member of academia).

Some might say that Robinhood actions are ethically acceptable. I would say that in the event of all other possibilities being exhausted, yes this is acceptable. How come? What makes this different? It is intention, and one might argue, stealing back already stolen property. WHAT?! Stealing back STOLEN PROPERTY?!?!?!?

Extreme wealth is a kind of sin. Greed is a kind of sin. What do you really need? It's not talked about as much as it could be in this highfalutin town of Santa Barbara. But really, making huge amounts of money at the expense of the poor is a kind of cheating. It's a kind of sin. That's not in the 10 commandments, but it could be just as damaging as lying, if not more so. This is why, as a culture, as the Church, we need to have a discussion of what is really damaging to the community. What is important? What do we value? What would break Jesus' heart? Those are the things we need to consider. When we consider those questions, we can begin to weigh the worst of actions and decide how we need to change.

God help us as we prayerfully struggle with these things.