Sin is like a drug. Good analogy?

[mVitus]

So today I was talking with someone, let’s call him Dave, and the conversation turned to Heaven and could it actually be a utopia.

So Dave’s point was that he looked at human nature now. He asked that, suppose a child and their parent on Earth fight. An eternity spent together would eventually lead to fights. (I’m summarizing.) And that for there to be no bad, there’d be no free will.

My response fell along the lines of that in Heaven we no longer have a desire to sin. That we would freely choose to do good. I also asked if, given a chance, if he would get rid of the bad parts of himself.
His answer was no, that they’re part of who he is.

At the time I didn’t have a good point on that matter to bring up, but if I ever wind up in a discussion like it again, I would like thoughts on an analogy I thought of afterwards.

Suppose I compared sin to a drug. Let us liken The Fall of Adam and Eve to a parent that takes a drug. They become addicted. There is an unhealthy attraction to this drug that’s passed on. Now a person may know a drug is wrong. They see its bad effects and know it’s harmful. They know it’s bad, but the addiction keeps drawing them to it or having a desire for it even if they refrain. In this analogy, they get to Heaven. The addiction is gone. The addiction to the harmful drug is gone. And not only is it gone, but they learn a lot more about what the drug does to a body. They truly understand now in ways they never did before just how terrible the drug is. And to top it all off, what they tried to fill with the drug, love, joy, is with them. Would this person ever want to take the drug?

So is that a decent analogy? Or are there gaping holes?

 

[RandomAlias]

It is a good analogy, though it may have its limits.

It reminds me of something Bishop Robert Barron wrote or said:

One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as “concupiscence,” but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term “addiction.” When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.

And just as one addicted to heroin may, through great effort and by the grace of God, stop taking the drug but still crave it for the rest of his life, one addicted to sin can repent yet continue to be tempted.

 

[Glark]

Possibly. Habitual sin can occur because it is pleasurable. Sins of the flesh are an obvious candidate, but some people literally love to steal, for example. The effects of Original Sin means there is no end to the ways humans can indulge in evil pleasures, which are addictive, just like a drug.