Sorry I didn’t elaborate more in my first post:
Faith without works is dead.
Faith and works are alive.
Without faith and works, well, you’re screwed.
Works without faith are local, to the religion you practice.
Sorry, still not with you. Not sure where you got statements 2 and 4 (and statement 3 seems a little skewed) or what the connection between the statements is. But it’s late, maybe my brain has shut off.
As to the second thought: sin is a destruction of the bond between a individual and God,
OK.
I am then assuming God is ‘maintained’, to put it very crudely, by Her/His relationships with humans.
That is a religious belief that exists. I have usually encountered it in people who are on the way to or from atheism in modern society. I think that some pagan religions believed that their gods became more powerful when more people worshipped them. I am not aware of any that felt their gods actually needed the worship to continue to exist, but I am not an expert. It is certainly not a Christian belief (or Jewish, or Muslim). I’m not sure how it connects with the previous statement either.
What we believe as Christians is that we are “maintained” by our relationship with God. Being the Ultimate Cause of all things, we are in relation to him by our mere existence, whether we like it or not. But we become more fully human when we also have chosen to have a spritual (and sacramental, if we’re Catholic) relationship with God.
As I see it, there is only one fool-proof way to ruin this bond, suicide, but mass extinction seems to be a ‘viable’ alternative.
Interesting use of “viable.”
The idea that suicide was a fool-proof way to ruin the bond is why suicides were not permitted to be buried in consecrated ground for centuries. Now, we understand that a person can have psycho/neurological illness which causes them not to be fully responsible for this ultimate rejection of life.
G.K. Chesterton said something about suicide once that stuck with me.
G. K. Chesterton:
Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer.
I agree with him, at least as it relates to people who decide to commit suicide, as opposed to those who are hounded into it by mental illness (temporary or permanent).
By real sin, I suppose I meant that to read: “perfect sin”.
“Perfect Sin” doesn’t exist,
Sorry, I’m afraid it sounds like you made something up and then said it doesn’t exist. To me perfect sin is an oxymoron. Sin is imperfection and lack. So I guess perfect sin would be a complete lack of existence, so maybe you said something profound and it took me a while to see it.
much like the pure vision of the Kingdom of God descending upon us to “fix” our existence.
Are you saying that the vision doesn’t exist, or that it is a vision of something that won’t happen? Because the Lord Jesus is coming in glory not to fix our current mode of existence, but to end it.
Think of morality in terms of a bell-curve, it’s really difficult to be on the extremities, so for the majority in the center- what’s sin to them? It’s no longer breaking their relationship with God, it’s disobedience.
Things can be damaged without being broken. If they are good things, it is bad when they are damaged, even if they are not broken. Not only that, but the sins themselves cause damage to people. That’s why they’re sins. God didn’t sit down on day 8 and say, “gee, this new world needs some rules. I wonder what I can come up with.”
I’ll admit as the rest of the world, religion has been used as a means of oppression, but it’s core principles of establishing the civilities of a stable society are priceless to both history and philosophers. There is no balance, it’s a dance, or the tide if you prefer, a constant ebb and flow of society’s devotion, mankind’s atrocities, and divine forgiveness.
That sounds very nice, but I’m still not entirely sure what you mean, what the evidence is for this ebb and flow you are talking about, or why/how a god who is dependent on people’s worship (which is what you said about God above) is in a position to forgive or (especially) to withhold forgiveness. It is the dependent creatures that seek forgiveness, not to grant it. Of course in the Christian view, divine forgiveness makes sense, because God is God, even if all men turned against Him. We cannot make God any more or less powerful by any actions of ours, because we are completely dependent on Him, not vice versa.
And, BTW, if religion were just a fancy way of creating a stable society, you could
have it, for all of me. If religion weren’t true, I wouldn’t want it, even if the price of giving it up were anarchy. Fortunately, it’s actually true.
–Jen
