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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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First, the idea of sin isn't that you avoid sin because God will punish you for it, but because sin is bad in and of itself:

Well - yes, that's mostly what I said. I avoid [bad thing], because [bad thing] is bad in and of itself, when you dig down to the root of it. And I understand that in the Christian tradition, doing good things and not doing bad things is also thought to bring man closer to the state of Heaven.

The issues begin when people's intuition of what is good [joyful, peaceful, knowledgeable and powerful] starts coming in conflict with what the Good Book tells us is good [mostly focusing on what God said is good], and somewhere in the middle the church muddles things further. I as an atheist do not grok "sin" because "sin" to me is specifically something that a Higher Power has ontologically, fundamentally deemed to be Bad and which is separate from what a human might deem bad for their own purposes and with their own frame of seeing things. Because I do not believe into a Higher Power, or that even if a small-h higher power exists it does not hold fundamental authority over morals, I am not moved by condemnations of sin. As I said elsewhere, if a thing is harmful you don't need the S word to justify its harmfulness.