Answer to; "Well it's not hurting anyone"?

[k5thbeatle]

Sin hurts the sinner. That’s the very definition of sin: it is an affront to his own nature and being.

I totally agree. I think the problem is with non-believers or people who don’t think there is such thing as sin?

 

[jmcrae]

Sin hurts the sinner. That’s the very definition of sin: it is an affront to his own nature and being.

Right, exactly. It makes us a flawed copy of what we were created to be.

 

[fred_conty]

I have a non-catholic friend who often brings up arguments with me knowing that I am catholic. One topic that I stumble on finding the right words to answer my friend is in regards to certain sins that appear to have no “victim”. For example, my friend will often bring up sexual sins and say something like, “Well they are both consenting adults and they’re not hurting anyone, so why does it matter?”, or something similar.

I know it offends God as all sin does but how do I explain this to someone who doesn’t see this?

How about Hell. Is that hurting someone enough?

 

[CatholicRoots]

Sometimes we just have to accept something is a sin regardless of how much we understand it, since God is omniscient. Also people should realise that sexual sin is a lot more destructive to all people involved than people think. When you look at it on the surface at a superficial level it seems harmless enough but it is a cause of many evils. For instance it can become addictive, it will always plague you when in future relationships because you always need that gratification thus leading to affairs, you become more disposed to objectify people in your mind etc… (the sin sometimes makes you, [the sinner] the victim, it doesn’t neccassarily have to affect anyone else.)

Also tell him that Morality is not about doing moral things out of obligation but really we should strive to do moral things because we want to be moral; irrespective of whether anybody sees us commit good or bad actions or not. So you shouldn’t do something because somebody tells you it’s right and otherwise you will be punished but you should do it because as a moral being you want to do what is right. Even concerning good actions its always better to act out of love, than to act out of compulsion. (Parable of the Widow with 2 coins(?))

 

[Pfaffenhoffen]

The is a dogma that is in the Creed. That we are one Body. I think in English would be “The Communion of the Saints”.

We, all Christians, are one body. So, there are no individual sins. What hurts the foot hurts the whole Body. What one Christian does of Good or Bad hurts the Whole Body of the Church.

 

[k5thbeatle]

Just got a reminder about this thread as I was watching the news. At some college a kid asked one of the presedential candidates, “If two men get married and live together how is that affecting you personally?” I highlighted personally as the questioner seemed to emphasize the word.

Again this reminded me that either you believe and get it or you don’t but the issue seems to be that those that do not believe (those that see no sin) cannot understand how/why others do and why the believers rules should apply to them? (Hope that makes sense)

 

[Nate13]

The answer to your question is very simple…

Stop thinking about how it affects you and start thinking about how it affects your society. If you can see that your society is being harmed, then very obviously, you are being affected.

Here’s a little hypothetical for you -

Say one man goes home after work each night and gets blind drunk. Is it affecting you?
Say 50 men go home and get drunk every night after work. Is it affecting you?
Say 1000 men go home each night and get blind drunk. Does it affect you?
Say half the population went home and got blind drunk every night. Would it affect you?

The question becomes, when does private behaviour start to affect the public interest? Once it does, it is affecting you.

1 man decides to have 10 wives
100 men decide to have 10 wives each
1000 men decide to have 10 wives each
100,000 men decide to have 10 wives each

The population is naturally divided almost 50/50 between men and women. If 1 man practices polygamy, no big deal. If 100,000 men practice polygamy its going to cause some problems.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Two consenting adults having sex aren’t ‘hurting anybody?’

Hmmm. Ask the ‘consenting adult’ who gets ‘dumped’ for somebody newer and more exciting if the ‘sex that won’t hurt anybody’ is still a memory of pure joy. Ask that person if after experience after experience of ‘let’s have fun, no strings, we’re consenting adults’ and then being left again and again, “it was fun while it lasted, I told you no strings, I’m just not into you any more”. . .if they don’t ‘hurt’, if they are still even able to trust in themselves or others after so many bad experiences.

Ask the ‘consulting adult’ who does the dumping , “Hey, I said no strings, I want to be free to experience what I want” if the continued experience of getting his way, his desires, with no consequences, no thought for the hurt of the other person but only his own satisfaction, doesn’t wind up hurting him inside, turning him into a monster of selfishness and entitlement, out only for the brief sensation of ‘novelty’, needing more and more new ‘bodies’ to arouse his satiation of his empty lusts. . .isn’t HE hurt as well?

What of the families and friends who have to deal with the RESULTS of 'two consenting adults having fun?" . . .having to comfort the hurt ones, trying to reason with the ‘dumpers’, trying to get the one group to trust again and the other group to crack open the hard heart of selfishness. . .

Oh there is PLENTY of hurt going on out there. All society is hurt by the consequences of these little ‘consentual affairs’ as women become more objectified, the culture is hypersexualized, men become more selfish and brutish. . .

I agree with this post. A person has a dulled conscience indeed if he cannot look back on his life and review those sins that “didn’t hurt anybody” and see how perhaps they really did.

If, indeed, another person is involved, how can we really be sure he/she was unaffected by it? How can we know for sure that, e.g., a partner in fornication did not ultimately become remorseful and perhaps even unbalanced by it? How can we be sure that person did not (as some people most assuredly do) keep that experience alive in his/her memory so that the mental effect of remembering the other partner as forever young and charming and attractive, is not a blight on his/her own marriage when his/her spouse becomes older, dumpier, less attractive or even ill? How can we be sure we were not the injector of a harmful fantasy? How can we be sure that person’s children were unaffected by a dullness or even an alienation in their parents’ relationship wrought by that fantasy? After all, people get twisted by pornography. Is there any good reason to think the pornography of past experience is any the less potent? And what about the childrens’ children, or the childrens’ playmates upon whom the children might take out some distress at home? And what about the playmates’ children if the displaced retribution is sufficiently severe? On and on it goes.

If we, ourselves, delve into sexual fantasy, does anyone really think his/her partner is unaffected by that? Does anybody really think the perfection which fantasization can produce does not result in unfavorable comparison of our own spouse to the fantasy; to a dullness in attraction that ought to be based on something better than make-believe? If we are not married, do unreasonable expectations borne of fantasization deprive us of a rich love live with a real person, or that real person of what would otherwise have been an excellent spouse? What disappointments do we turn into action or inaction when real people are not “air-brushed”, and what are the consequences of those actions or inactions?

Do we really know for sure that our “secret acts”, and not just sexual acts, are truly unknown? What one of us has not, at some time in our lives, run across old evidences of others’ wrongful acts, long past? What child has not, and how did that evidence affect him? Our “secrets” are nowhere near as secret as we would like to think. Do we know for sure that some seemingly harmless acquisition, say, does not significantly affect another? We can’t know anything of the kind, though we can certainly imagine truly terrible resulting scenarios.

My mental image of sin is that of a stone cast into a lake. We focus on the immediate splash, and think that ends it. Possibly we might even see, even admire, the most prominent ripples resulting. What we do not see is that the impact resounds throughout the whole lake. Ripples, however tiny by then, hit the opposite shore, however far away it is. We just don’t know it, and we don’t know it because we don’t pay close enough attention. We’re interested in the splash, and that’s all we know.

We’re credibly told by a number of saints (Ste Therese being perhaps my favorite) that, upon our judgment before God, our sins will appear before us in their full measure. We will see the ripples hit the opposite shore and reverberate back and into the depths as well. We will see every life affected in its fullness. As Ste Therese says, we will be so appalled by that vision; the reality of which we could well have foreseen at least in part, that we will do one of two things: We will immediately cast ourselves as volunteers into hell because we will refuse to accept the condemnation our own actions have demanded of us and so bitterly resent He who showed us that vision that we hate Him…or…We will cast ourselves on His mercy, knowing full well that we cannot possibly deserve it and have in no way earned it, accept it that only He can remove from us the horror of what we know is true, and be united to Him.

(continued)

 

[Ridgerunner]

(continued)

Heady stuff. Now, how are we going to prepare for that denoument? How can we even imagine that we will not, upon confronting the fullness of the ripples, wrap ourselves in the cocoon of our own egos forever (which is possibly the worst part of hell), and instead accept the pain of truly knowing, and the mercy that we might instead, at that moment, view as demeaning?

Ste Therese says several things about that, but one of them is training oneself to be clear-eyed about the “ripples” of our acts now, however painful that might be. As with her admonition to simply “love God” primarily by casting other kinds of ripples by acts of even small charity, since God has already told us that’s how we are to love Him.

Seems to me, it’s best to be Catholic, and to admit to the gravity of our sins even when we don’t know the full measure of them, and to think more deeply about the harms we might actually be causing by our prideful assertions that “nobody’s hurt” when we know nothing of the sort. It seems likely to me that in owning up to sin now, we are much more likely to be able to look it in the face on that day of judgment and not react with fatal pride and hate toward He who will tell us the truth, but can save us.

 

[LiseTravis]

Lots of good answers here. I have a little bit to add, but I’m not sure how to word what I’m thinking- hope I get my point across.
When I sin, it hurts my relationship with God. When I am out of His Will, I can’t discern His Will. God may have had in mind some way to use me for " good", but that can’t happen now, because I can’t hear Him. That “good” may never happen, & I can’t even conceive of all the ramifications of this.