Topics

Sin | 4 August 2024 (updated 12 June 2026)
Hell | 11 June 2024
Faith | 15 October 2024
Logic | 15 October 2024

Sin

1. God loves us (i.e. created us, provides for our needs, and determines our purpose), so we should trust and obey Him.

2. Since we do not trust and obey God, we are sinners.

1. Love is not transactional (i.e. love is given without conditions and expectations).
2. If God loves people, he shouldn’t expect them to trust and obey him.
3. Sin is any action or thought that goes against God’s will.
4. If God no longer wills people to trust and obey Him, then there is no sin and no need to be saved by Jesus.

Christianity has a paradox: it promotes divine love and yet divine justice. Love implies forgiveness yet justice implies punishment. Many people nowadays accept the forgiveness in the new testament (Jesus dying for everyone's sins), while using some weird explanations to guarantee that God will discriminate and punish sinners (the last judgement). Which makes you question to what degree God actually forgave anyone, and what the purpose of that forgiveness was.

My private feeling is that Jesus' sacrifice is the ultimate guilt trip. Humans were nasty. But instead of being mean right back at them, God decides to do the most wonderful thing he can do, so that humans are perpetually in debt to him. This would reconcile the 'seemingly forgiving' God of the new testament, with the wrathful, authoritarian, and megalomaniac God of the old testament.

My spiritual feeling tells me that there is no sin. There is only divine love. The neat side effect of this: the paradox disappears.

The narrative of sin: 'We do wrong things and should be punished'

The narrative of sin comes from:

• an absolute understanding of right/wrong (which is a limited way to understand the world),
• an excessive emphasis on punishment as remedy (which is quite backward-looking and not forward-looking), and
• the supercharged reaction of guilt and self-chastising (such that even children are guilty of what Adam and Eve did).

It is a psychological knot that is not conducive to healing. And the collective belief that it is the case only serves to enforce and strengthen the shared psychological dynamic (Vadim Zeland's pendulums).

On the political and sociological front, it is a very useful form of social control. Which is probably its historical origin, and why it retains such a strong grip on the population.

Hell

I met a good friend of mine who’s a Christian. She described hell not as a place of suffering, like the popular portrayal of souls burning in hell. In fact, hell would look like where we are right now. The difference is that one lacks any hope of attaining universal love, which she attributes to God.

(By universal love, I refer to agape: 'profound sacrificial love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance'.)

Hell sounds like a very disturbing place to be. It probably exists as a state-of-mind, but states-of-mind are rarely permanent.

Faith

Note: I wrote this out in one go and haven’t edited it yet.

Faith is the attitude of 1) trust and 2) endurance, towards the idea that God’s plan will be realised.

1. Trust in God is hard enough. Instead of taking things as is, humans want to understand why things are. Also, the emotional trust, to give up one’s sense of self-reliance and be emotionally intimate with someone who seemingly doesn’t respond to your prayer and spiritual seeking, is hard.
2. If trust weren’t hard enough, being enduring and retaining this trust over time is hard^2.

Faith is a really interesting concept — it appears fundamental to any spirituality.

Even in science, you could say there is faith towards the objective and regular recording of data through instruments. When scientists release a probe to Mars, they’re faithful that the probe will send back accurate data. One might say they have evidence to believe this. But 'evidence' comes from other instruments and methods of measurement — like whatever tests they put the probe through before sending it out. Ultimately they perceive these tests through their senses. So they still have faith in instruments.

Spiritual faith is about the supremacy of some emotional and interpretative themes over others. Devastating circumstances, like the suffering of the Palestinians attacked in the Gaza strip, tests people’s ability to return to these fundamental themes. The people of faith should return to trust and the silent hope that eventually things will be good, despite their fear and anguish. Likewise, they should return to the belief that God will bring justice, despite all their other beliefs that injustice is everywhere and keeps happening.

So that’s how faith is ideally done. How to 1) detect what one is faithful about, and 2) deepen that faith, is the thing that still eludes me. Well, to do these things takes emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Emotional intelligence is learnt by mirroring when you talk to emotionally intelligent people. Whereas self-awareness is learnt by reflection and meditation… probably. Even if I broke down the skills required, it’s still… too theoretical. It’s not enough. I don't understand what faith is and my sense is that it is approached emotionally.

The practical attempts to promote faith I’ve seen are quite dissatisfying. Perhaps this is because most Christians I’ve met are everyday people — they aren’t experts in Christianity, and think about it or engage in these themes as an adjunct to whatever they usually do. These Christians I’ve met, as friends and in church events, don’t seem to be able to share their faithfulness very well, to reassure other Christians who begin to question their faith. They just repeat in some language or other, with some scripture or personal experience, to 'have faith'. It’s possible to express this message in a way that’s emotionally stirring. It’s just that I haven’t met any such Christians before.

Logic

Note: This was a series of text messages I sent to a friend.

Do you believe that logic would contradict religion?

Rarely, and that’s why religion/spirituality is so interesting. A thoughtful person can loophole their way out and make huge claims.

If you question someone’s spirituality enough, you’ll arrive at philosophical and introspective questions that logic can’t answer. Like:

• Is everything designed by an intelligent being?
• Would everything turn out good and make sense in the end?
• Is death truly the end, or do we get to live and try again?

Given the limits of logic, spirituality allows emotional intuition as a valid source of knowledge :O You could see it as another paradigm of knowledge. It deals with:

• different questions
• different tools to find answers
• different criteria to assess what makes an answer good

So while it’s not as rigorous as science, that’s not the point… its goal is to be meaningful.

Meaning must be coherent, so it includes logical rigour, but rigour alone is not sufficient.

So you believe that some parts of spirituality exceeds the boundaries of logic, and therefore you can use emotion to answer it?

Yeah, I think it’s ultimately about meaning.

• Questions: as above
• Tools to find answers: emotional resonance, personal experience, logic, etc
• Criteria to assess what makes an answer good: meaning

Today, many of us value logic — we find it meaningful. But people didn’t always value logic in the past. They might’ve valued tradition, utility, or grandeur instead. So their spirituality formed around that.

Yet no matter what time you live in, meaning is emotional. As such, those who are the most inspiring and helpful in spirituality are emotionally intelligent and self-aware.

In other words: people who are logically intelligent, yet steamroll your feelings, are bad examples to learn spirituality from! :p Let the arrogant ‘atheists’ frolick about in their mud over there…