"Sin" is a synonym for "Finitude"
Even atheists have to deal with the consequences of not being God
We enter this world as infants, living helpless lives of discomfort and disorientation until we come online enough to smile. We grow up a bit and get on our feet and still deal with discomfort and frustration, the world never quite doing exactly what we want, but our feelings and desires fill us with life all the same.
Then, one day, our feelings and desires lead us to disaster. A sibling grabs for a toy in our hands and we push them away and they fall and everyone in the room hears something inside them crack. Or maybe we play ‘chase’ with a shiny knife in our hands. Or maybe our parents don’t react perfectly to our first-ever bad grade.
Either way, one day, we all learn that isn’t just the world that hurts, but that *we* can cause hurt too. We can be responsible for leaving ourselves and others in a state of great pain and isolation. The people we love and depend on can reject us, roaring with anger at the pain we have left them with, unable to sustain our presence in their lives for a moment longer, leaving us alone and afraid and very rightfully so.
Relational ruptures, some of them at least, can be repaired. But none of us ever get over the sudden awareness that rupture is a possibility, that we might be responsible for other people rejecting us, that whatever our abstract worthiness-of-love might be that we can and do and will play a central role in making that love impossible.
It’s the great work of adult human life to deal with this consciousness well.
This is what ‘sin’ is, to me (1): actions that generate heartbreak and isolation, from explosions of violence to the slow burn of lying. Sin isn’t just obvious villainous cruelty, it’s our capacity in general for deep moral error. Something can feel good and seem right and prove to be very, very wrong. Everything within us, from our darkest anger to our brightest joy, can ultimately deceive us and entice us to bring great evil into the world.
To be clear, this isn’t to say that everything within us is *necessarily* deceptive, just that it is *possibly* deceptive. Even if we aren’t making it impossible for others to love in this very moment, we can drift into it without knowing that we’re doing it. We can correct and recalibrate and go to therapy and do all kinds of growth work and make every change that is our responsibility to make and still our capacity for evil will exceed our knowledge and power. We will always, always be capable of surprising ourselves with our own monstrosity.
This is because human beings are not God - we are non-infinite, condemned to be limited in our knowledge and power and goodness.
I mentioned above that it is the great work of adult human life to deal with this consciousness well. How are we to deal with this consciousness ‘well’? How can we ever live well with the inevitability of death and our own helpless responsibility for suffering?
One way to deal with this consciousness poorly is by running from it. Alcohol use is where a lot of people fall, trying to chemically disable the part of their brain that is conscious of the human condition. People drink and become impulsive and self-absorbed, the seductive poison leaving them feeling universally beloved and incapable of wrong, and in their impulsive self-absorption take actions that generate even more of the misery they’re trying and failing to run from. People react to their metaphysical powerlessness by seeking physical power, dominating their brain to force it to feel and think affirmative thoughts only.
To be clear, what I am criticizing here isn’t neuropharmacology in and of itself - what I’m criticizing is *self-medication*.
What I see as a better solution than self-medication is the pursuit of two interrelated virtues: humility and resilience.
To define terms, a ‘virtue’ is a quality (2), a property that you can possess. A virtue is not a rule to follow, nor is it an outcome. Human life is uncertain, and as such we can’t know every rule to follow in every unpredicted situation and we can’t perfectly control every outcome. What we can do is try to cultivate some inner qualities that help us navigate these uncertain situations. Instead of asking “what am I supposed to do”, as “how am I supposed to be”?
So, being humble and resilient is the best way I can see to deal with the inevitable consequences of our finitude, aka ‘sin’. To be humble is to be somewhere in between ‘humiliated’ and ‘arrogant’. To be humiliated would be to see 100% of your motivations and actions as corrupt by default and wallow in a state of self-pity and paralysis. It would be confusing “not necessarily good” for “necessarily not good”. Arrogance would be at the other end of this spectrum, declaring that 0% of your motivations and actions are bad, that you’re a blameless angel and that every single rejection you’ve faced is the everyone else’s fault. Arrogance would be to worship ‘authenticity’ as the highest value, asserting that your appetites and passing thoughts are the highest source of truth and that the world owes it to you to agree with you and constantly affirm your righteousness.
Being humble is finding the right middle ground between these two extremes, being conscious of the inevitability of error and living your life anyway, accepting responsibility when you inevitably fail with minimal self-pity.
Resilience is a related virtue, in between the extremes of frailty and imperviousness. Imperviousness would mean never feeling any kind of pain when reflecting on your motivations and actions, and frailty would mean collapsing instantly. Imperviousness can only be brought about by not caring about the pain you cause at all, feeling no empathy for those who suffer by your hand. Frailty would mean making it impossible to confront you at all about your problems, exploding and collapsing and punishing others for ever giving you any kind of feedback at all.
Being resilient is finding the right middle ground between those two extremes - when you realize that you’ve done something wrong, feeling *exactly bad enough* to never do it again.
In general, coping with the imperfect human condition means finding the virtuous middle ground between extreme overreactions. Finding that middle ground is hard and staying there is even harder, and we all spend our lives trying and usually failing to correct ourselves.
Turning towards the imperfect human condition and our own inevitable imperfections is the best way I can think of to actually make the world a better place to live. We improve the world by acknowledging that there is something fundamentally un-improvable about ourselves and by dealing with it as best as we can through humility and resilience. By acknowledging our own imperfections we gain access to a deeper kind of solidarity with humanity (3), sinners all, flailing in the void. Every villain suffers and copes as best as they can with their suffering. Every villain dies.
Ru Paul, at the end of every episode of their TV show “Drag Race”, asks - “if you can’t love yourself how the hell are you going to love somebody else? Can I get an amen?” I think this points to something profoundly true, and that this is true in the inverse: if you can hate yourself then you can ultimately hate anybody. Nobody could ever quantify this, but I bet that a great deal of the cruelty of the world is displaced self-hatred, people blaming and destroying others to displace their resentment at themselves, resentment that is ultimately inevitable due to our helpless finitude.
So, by acknowledging the inevitability of our failure - that causing pain doesn’t make us a bad person, it just *makes us a person* - we can at least begin to forgive ourselves. Maybe we can forgive others too, seeing the villains of our lives as fellow sufferers just like us.
Or maybe we won’t, for we know not what we do.
Footnotes:
Kierkegaard's exploration of anxiety in "The Concept of Anxiety" (1844) provides the philosophical backbone for much of my thinking here. For Kierkegaard, anxiety arises from our consciousness of possibility - specifically, the possibility of sin. Unlike fear, which has a definite object, anxiety emerges from our awareness of our own freedom and its terrible implications. This "dizziness of freedom," as he calls it, comes from recognizing that we are capable of actions that could irreparably damage our relationships and sense of self. The anxiety precedes the sin, making it both the source of our fall and, potentially, our salvation through heightened self-awareness.
Particularly relevant is Kierkegaard's insight that anxiety is fundamentally different from guilt - while guilt follows from actual wrongdoing, anxiety emerges from the mere possibility of wrongdoing. This distinction illuminates why even morally conscientious people can feel perpetually unsettled: it's not about what we have done, but about what we might do, what we might discover ourselves as capable of doing. Kierkegaard sees this as intimately connected to temporality - we exist always in a present moment haunted by future possibilities. Martin Heidegger did great work in discovering and extending these insights, and I also always find it worthwhile to swim upstream and look at this ideas clsoer to the source.
Here I’m very directly calling on Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, developed in his “Nicomachean Ethics”(~335BC). Aristotle argues that virtue lies between two vices - one of excess and one of deficiency. For him this "mean" isn't some simple mathematical average, but rather the proper amount relative to the particular situation and the particular individual. What makes this especially relevant here is Aristotle's insight that finding this mean requires practical wisdom (“phronesis”) rather than just theoretical knowledge - we can all reflect on our condition and do our best to be good people but we still end up learning how to live the hard way and there’s no amount of reading that’ll get us out of that.
I really like the work of Martin Buber, whose "I and Thou" (1923) inspires me here. Buber distinguishes between two fundamental modes of relating: I-It relationships, where we treat other humans as objects to be analyzed or used, and I-Thou relationships, where we encounter others in their full, incomprehensible, mysterious, terrifying humanity. For Buber, I-Thou relationships require vulnerability and risk - we cannot truly encounter another person while maintaining perfect control or invulnerability (4). True connection requires us to remain open to being affected and even wounded by others, and also requires us to be open to the possibility that we might wound them too and have to live with the consequences. It is precisely our shared vulnerability and imperfection that allows us to have an authentic encounter. When we try to conceive of and present ourselves as morally perfect we create I-It relationships with others, treating them as mere audiences for our performance of virtue rather than fellow travelers in moral uncertainty.
This is why things like pornography and prostitution are erotic without being sexual. Genital excitement and stimulation might be involved and it might even involve another person, but the entire encounter is framed such that nothing can go wrong. This doesn’t make pornography and prostitution bad in and of themselves, but it does open them up for abuse - no quantity of porn and prostitution can ever match or even approximate the quality of a truly sexual encounter, since sexual encounters involve a dimension of vulnerability and risk that impossible to prevent and impossible to simulate.