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"The word of Sin is Restriction." - Liber Al vel Legis 1:41 "I don't believe in sin," a self-proclaimed forward-thinking Pagan friend of mine once told me. "It's an out-moded idea used to keep people in line and afraid of their own sexuality. Nothing is sinful. Everything we do with our bodies is holy, and a means of connecting with the Divine." "Even murder, rape, oppression, and genocide?" "Well, no. Not those things. I mean, there are bad things in the world - but I wouldn't call them sinful." My friend's squeamishness regarding this term - and others apopriated by Christianity - is not uncommon in the circles in which I associate, nor is it terribly suprising, either. Part of the process of individuation requires a person to dissasociate and reject prior notions in order to develop new ones of their own. But therein lies the key - the adolescent in perpetual rebellion against the ideas and strictures of his parents is not yet a full, adult individual person. Only when he can look at something objectively and formulate his own opinions on a given subject has he reached that all-important stage. This may mean that he completely rejects the ideas of his parents - but it may also mean that he finds some merit in them. And in that spirit, I think it would be premature to completely abandon the notion of sin. Now, of course, I probably have a very different concept of sin from your average red-faced Baptist minister preaching hellfire and brimstone from the pulpit. In point of fact, I would probably consider many of the things that he rails against to be great goods, and many of the things that he hails as intolerable evils. But I think that we would probably agree in this: sin is a transgression, a great wrong-doing, a wilful choice of the lesser, baser, and selfish path, a violation of the natural harmony and order of things. In Kemetic thought isfet is the opposite of ma'at: it is violent destruction, pointless chaos, uncreation. Thelema teaches that each of us has a personal destiny, our True Will, which we must live by and fulfill to the exclusion of all else. When we are living according to this, we are acting in concert with the harmony of the cosmos. But when we strive against this, even in ignorance, even through noble if misplaced self-sacrifice, all that effort will come to naught, and we will be courting disaster and personal destruction. And this, to bring our discussion full circle, is the essence of sin as I understand it. Sin as most of us experience it is usually not an active thing. Certainly, it can be when we intentionally do things we know are wrong - speaking hurtful words, stealing something, etc. But let's face it, most of us aren't capable of the really big active sins. (Whether by inclination or lack of opportunity is another matter.) Most of us don't creep about on the streets at night, raping and robbing and randomly murdering German tourists. Almost none of us will lead pograms or initiate nuclear holocausts. No, this isn't the sort of evil that most of us face on a daily basis - ours is of a much more subtle and hideous sort. The evil we face is a passive, tolerant, apathetic kind. Every time that we fail to live up to our potential, when we fail to speak up against an injustice, when we fail to put in that little bit of effort that would have made a difference, when we avert our eyes from the suffering around us, every time that we take the easy way out, or sit back thinking that we can't make a difference anyway, so what's the use of trying, every time that we feel or think something but fail to act upon it, letting our urges, dreams, desires slowly die - we are sinning, and this last is the worst sort of sin, for it is a sin against the spirit. As William Blake said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence." This sort of passive attitude - this internal censorship - this refusal to act - this Restriction - is far more destructive, far more insidious, far more dangerous than any kind of active force, however wrong, could be. Consider the following scenario: a frail old woman is mugged by a crazed drug-fiend looking for enough cash to score a fix while a strong, able-bodied young man stands by watching on. Who rouses our indignation more? The mugger who, while committing the actual crime did so only to stop the pain of addiction, or the man who mutely stood by and let it happen? As Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." And this is precisely the thing that we are conditioned to allow by society and its molevolent rulers. The media bombards us with images calculated to fill us with hopeless despair and futility: paragons of virtue such as preachers and teachers try to convince us that our desires are base, our dreams are foolish, our efforts will result in nothing unless we're practical, learn to conform and play by society's rules, that we must quietly accept the shit that's shoveled into our mouths, with never a word of criticism or expressions of how dissatisfied we are by our colour tvs, our SUVs, our designer Martha Stewart Living pleated sheets. And as long as we accept this and placidly follow along, we fail to become everything that we could be, all that we're meant to be. When we fail to speak up against the things that piss us off, fail to believe we can make a difference - we've succeeded in killing a part of us, our inner man. And by so doing, we have become a sinner as surely as any Adolf Hitler*, Jeffery Dhamer, or Michael Jackson that ever walked the face of the earth. * No modern discussion of ethics is complete without at
least a passing reference to Hitler. So here's mine. |
