Radical Incline Posts

The question was asked, "Does God consider it a sin to smoke pot?"

Unless you're speaking within a circle of like-believing religionists, you're apt to have some problems with jargon here.. like, what do you mean by "sin"? or "think"? or of course "God"?

The complexities of evil, sin, and forgiveness can be profound, yet can be simple enough for any child past the approximate age of the integrated self-willed self-aware personality's first moral choosing (three to six, generally). Presuming monotheism, one person at the center of the universe and of every individual, our One Parent, here's some definitions for enlightened discussion's sake:

"Evil," that which is cosmically wrong, wrong in God's plan, the ultimate view. You might do evil, probably do frequently and daily, and don't even know it because you're ignorant and partially evolved spiritually. Evil in and of itself is utterly forgivable. Someone confused enough to disbelieve in gravity may pay the ultimate mortal price but any understanding Father would without doubt forgive such mere mental confusion.

"Sin," on the other hand, is knowingly doing wrong. Here you get into a problem of subjectivity. You might be really doing right but believe you're doing wrong because of doctrinal confusion — Huck Finn helping a runaway slave, but feeling guilty about it because he comes from a slaveholding culture. But generally, if you have any sense of real right and wrong, like you clearly know you're stealing and it's wrong and do it anyway, that's real sin. Sin is forgivable, too, most especially once you quit sinning.

When sin becomes a habit, when one is so fouled up as to consistently choose to do that which is really understood to be wrong, then that person could eventually reach the point of utter "iniquity," at some point becoming dead in the sense of irredeemable personality breakdown. "The wages of sin is death."

But too much emphasis is paid to evil, sin, and iniquity in most religion. Preachers spend more time on the Devil than they do on God when they should know that the universe is Unity, not polarity. From our perspective, shadow, cold, hunger, and evil can seem "real," but they are only relativities. What we quantify is light. Heat is what's real and what we miss when "cold" is the absence of heat. Real hunger is the absence of what is supposed to be normal, a regular meal. Evil is likewise a measure of emptiness rather than the reality, being the absence or usually only partial realization of the Good in the evolving universe, fear but the absence of faith.