Why Do Believers Sin?

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Why do we who believe sin mortally? If you truly believe that dying in a state of mortal sin will kill you, why do we do it knowing we may die at any moment? Further, if we believe it is offensive to God, why do we sin mortally in such ways? Could it be that sin usually begins with doubt? Indeed, such would be an old tactic in the Book, “Will you truly die?”
 
People are accustomed to instant gratification. Couple that with a culture of “noone can impose morality on me”
“no one can tell me what to do, think, or believe”
and you have a whole nation of “anything goes” people.
How many fo those people do you think are catechized and truly understand the eternal ramifications? Very few. Most are not believers, and if they do claim belief, they refuse to belief that there is a consequence for anything.

no bueno.
 
Short answer: Pride. Longer answer: Pride, self-justification, and entitlement.
“well, yes, I know that fornication is a mortal sin and offends God. . .
BUT… .
She’s/he’s so hot, and it will feel so good and everybody else is doing it and I really love him/her right now or at least I love the idea of being in love and it will feel so good and it’s consensual and who am I hurting and everybody else is doing it and I’ve gone too far and she/he’ll be offended if I stop and what’s the harm and everybody’s doing it and God will forgive me if I’m sorry afterward even if I’m only sorry because I don’t want to go to hell but how can anybody go to hell for this because everybody is doing it and it’s consensual and I really like him/her and God gave us feelings and I’m not hurting anybody and the whole sin thing is all hyped up to control us because old celibate people hate others to have fun and I really like him/her and I’m not hurting anybody and everybody does it and God will forgive me IF it’s even wrong because I’m going to pretend I doubt it and find all kinds of excuses because I really want this so it can’t be wrong for me and I wouldn’t WANT a god who doesn’t allow love, how dare he try to stop love, so it’s all good and I really want to and everybody’s doing it. . .”
 
I do not believe that “believers” on average commit frequent personal mortal sins.
However they do often engage in grave matter with reduced culpability.

Then again it depends on how fervent you have to be to qualify as a “believer”.

My Catholic friends likely have not even engaged in grave matter for years.
But then my friends are over 50 and do their best to quietly help the community and some are daily mass goers.
 
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In my experience, because they don’t ‘really’ believe. That, despite what knowledge or claims they might make to the contrary.

The majority of people take sincere belief or risk/death seriously.

If you threaten someone’s cherished possession or even life partner, you can certainly bet they will hop into action and pay up.

When you don’t see a risk, or think you can avoid serious consequence - you endulge because you feel you can or it is worth it to do so.

Hardly likely if you were under serious impression there was a likelihood of your damnation.

Aside, yes people make mistakes based upon pressure, fear and many other things. But those usually contain a modicum of balance and regret.

Those who frequently sin, often have adopted a ‘one more wont hurt’ strategy. Jesus is more their bar keep, counting a ‘tab’, than he is their God or Messiah.
 
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We talk ourselves into thinking it’s not so bad and maybe even that it’s good.

The brain that wants to do something “not allowed” can make all kinds of excuses. Particularly if you’re thinking with your “little brain”, i.e. the one that is located in your genitalia.

Sooner or later you come to your senses and it’s like, “what was I thinking?!”
 
BlackFriar said:
My Catholic friends likely have not even engaged in grave matter for years.

But then my friends are over 50 and do their best to quietly help the community and some are daily mass goers.
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They may have had some pretty exciting “adventures” when they were 18, 25, or 30.
 
Sometimes it’s just an addiction that we can’t seem to get over. This is true for a lot of people who start a sinful behavior when they’re young, and then find it difficult to stop when they get older and learn / accept that the act is sinful.
 
To the people who say that those who engage in grave matter don’t really believe why don’t you take a step back and remind yourself that peter denied Christ three times and sat with the Jews instead of the gentiles and cut off that roman soldier’s ear. If he didn’t truly believe then why are his epistles in the Bible
 
Yeah, I’d say “not really believing something is a sin” or “not really believing you’ll go to Hell” is a different matter from “not really believing in Jesus Christ”.

I have met a lot of people who are strong believers in Jesus, regular Mass goers, support the Church in other ways, yet they still have a real problem coming to grips with the fact that they might commit sins, whether grave or not grave. I remember a whole conversation among a bunch of these type people I was privy to once, where they were all basically just shrugging off Confession as something that wasn’t really relevant or was kind of from the dark ages when people believed all that sin stuff. One of them was all like, meh, I’m just living my life and not worrying about it. This wasn’t a 14-year-old, it was a 45-year-old person.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
One of them was all like, meh, I’m just living my life and not worrying about it. This wasn’t a 14-year-old, it was a 45-year-old person.
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It’s frightening to consider how many people think like this. I know so many people who don’t really even think about God because they just say it’s not important to their life…
 
It’s too hard for them. Pray for them that they are able to think about it when it matters.

I am pretty sure God in his mercy would still save a lot of them. They aren’t bad people. But actually sitting up late at night thinking about sins and the possibility of hell is not for the faint of heart. I’m a pretty tough person and when I did this (about a year ago), my eyes bugged out of my head quite a bit. i then had anxiety over it for some months. And this is coming from somebody who by that point had already done the “return to the Church” thing (2 years ago), was going to Confession every month, and praying regularly. It would probably have been 100 times more upsetting if I had read such a thing 10 or 15 years ago when I was running around missing Mass and actively sinning all over the place, while occasionally going into a church somewhere praying confused prayers.

In the end the only way is to just throw yourselves on God’s mercy like St. Therese and St. Faustina said. And that is why they are both great saints and St. Faustina has a gigantic shrine and St. Therese is a Doctor of the Church. So simple, yet so hard for the average mind to arrive at without the help from Jesus through these saints.

“And we expect to receive everything promised us by Jesus in spite of all our wretchedness, For Jesus is our hope; Through His merciful heart, as through an open gate, we pass through to heaven.”
 
Clearly he wasnt yet a true believer, or was not in possession of himself. John was.

Again it depends on what the OP means by believer.
 
Note that St Peter before the Resurrection is not the same St Peter as after.
He was completely changed. Pretty much all the apostles were.
They went from people who run as their teacher was arrested and denied knowing Him, to those willing to die for the truth of His Resurrection.

The text even records that he repented after the last crow.

What I am wondering is why believers sin. What I mean by believers is those who believe in the Church teaching. Mortal sin kills you. I can somewhat understand venial sin, those can sometimes be accidents. But mortal sin?

I tend to look at the story of Genesis being a prototype for how temptation works. We want to be like our own gods, we don’t believe we will really die, etc.
 
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