Why We Still Need "Sin," Even If You Don't Believe in God

A Secular Case for Grace and Responsibility

We’ve thrown away a word for something that we desperately need to name.

This throwing away is understandable, in a way - for many of us, especially those who’ve stepped away from traditional religion, the word has become unusable. The word has been completely contaminated by its associations with judgment, shame, and cosmic scorekeeping.

That word is “sin.”

The problem, as I see it, is that we still need that word. We need some sort of language for the gap between our intentions and our actions, for the harm we cause despite our best efforts, for the bone-deep feeling that we are not enough and never ever can be. We need a way to name our inevitable insufficiency without drowning in self-loathing or, worse, pretending that we’ve transcended it entirely.

With that in mind, here’s what I want to offer: “sin,” without having anything to say about God, names something fundamental about the human condition - our radical finitude. Finitude, properly understood, is not a curse to escape but a truth to accept. Finitude is a truth that opens onto compassion, humility, and a deeper kind of responsibility.

What Finitude Means

Put another way: it doesn’t matter what you believe about God, what matters is that you are not it. To be human is to be non-infinite. We are limited in our knowledge, our virtue, and our power.

You see this playing out everywhere once you start looking. You see finitude in the parent who loses it with their kid after a difficult day, snapping in a moment of exhaustion in spite of their deepest devotion. You see finitude in the activist whose righteous certainty curdles into cruelty toward anyone who disagrees. You see finitude in the public policy designed with good intentions that destroys what it meant to save. You see finitude in the friend you hurt without realizing it until much later, if ever.

We all make decisions with imperfect information. We make decisions with incomplete data, inherited biases, emotional states we’re barely aware of. Indeed, we have to make decisions in general: we must say yes to some things and no to others, because our attention and time can’t be spent in two places at once. Even when we feel like we are choosing correctly we may be catastrophically wrong. Human history is littered with people who committed atrocities while fully convinced they were doing the right thing.

This is what finitude produces: inevitable failure. Not just the possibility of failure, but its certainty. No matter how wise you become, how disciplined, how morally serious, you will harm people. You will misunderstand. You will be wrong when you’re certain tha you’re right.

“Sin” Reconsidered

Traditional theology sees sin as “missing the mark” (the Greek hamartia) or as active rebellion against God. As I see it, the metaphor still stands. What is rebellion against an infinite being if not the refusal to accept our own finitude? What is missing the mark if not the inevitable result of shooting arrows with imperfect aim, imperfect vision, in imperfect wind?

Kierkegaard, the Christian Existentialist, wrote that “sin is despair”. Despair, for him, meant refusing to accept what we are. Despair is where we judge our finite life by infinite standards, where we expect our individual selves to be completely self-sufficient and to get life absolutely right on the very first try.

So here’s the reframing: Sin is finitude, and we are all equally sinners. This is not because we’re all equally harmful! This is not to say that everyone is equally evil nor that we’re all helpless and off the hook. What does assert is that no one stands outside the human condition. There is no amount of excellence that can put you in a different moral category than other human beings. You can and should seek as much wisdom and strength as you can, while remembering that no amount of wisdom and strength will deliver you from the possibility of failure.

Again, this is not to say that there is no difference between the person who tries to do good and the person who actively does harm. We must judge actions, we must hold people accountable, we must build systems that make cruelty very difficult to do.

Judgment itself must be tempered with humility. Pretending that we are literally God sets us up for self-hatred when we inevitably fall short. Pretending that we are literally God sets us up for dehumanizing cruelty when we treat others as if only we have the power to judge them too.

Grace in the Face of Finitude

This might sound like a vision of pessimism or irresponsibility. I think the exact opposite is true.

What this vision calls for is a deeper kind of responsibility - the responsibility for acceptance and grace.

“Grace” here is the choice to love in spite of reasons not to. Living in finitude means there will always, always be good reasons to declare someone unworthy of love, including ourselves. Every one of us is a walking contradiction: we are all hypocrites, we are all failures, we are all people who know better and do worse anyway. “Grace” is the choice to look at those very good reasons and then set them aside, choosing to love anyway.

Critically this isn’t a blank check. Grace doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries or accepting abuse. It doesn’t mean pretending harm didn’t happen or that consequences don’t matter. What does mean is seeing everyone - even those who oppose you, those who seem undeserving, those who squander their opportunities - as fellow sufferers in the same painful human story.

It means choosing to stop treating your failures as proof that you’re uniquely broken, because failure is the universal human condition.

What Has the Last Word

Finitude is the site of compassion and courage.

We are called to compassion because finitude forces us to see others as we see ourselves. You, me, and the worst person you know are all struggling, incomplete, and doing our best with inadequate tools. We are called to courage because facing our limits directly, without denial or despair, requires a particular kind of bravery. It’s easier to pretend we’re infinite (and torture ourselves when the illusion cracks) or to pretend finitude doesn’t matter (and try and fail to float above our responsibilities).

The challenge is not to somehow transcend our finitude and lead a life free of “sin.” I see that as the old trap, the game that nobody can win. The challenge is to face our condition directly, to confront the inevitability of failure and still declare that failure will not have the last word.

What has the last word, then? Not perfection, not transcendence, but resilience.

What has the last word is the choice to show up again after you’ve failed. What has the last word is the choice to love again after you’ve been horribly disappointed, even after you’ve horribly disappointed yourself. What has the last word is the choice to try again after you’ve been wrong. It’s Camus’s Sisyphus, who pushes the boulder up the mountain knowing it will roll back down, and does it anyway—and in that choice, in that acceptance, finds something like freedom.

Finitude means we will fail, no matter what. Grace means that we can fail and still be worthy of love, no matter what. Courage means we can know that we will always have good reasons to give up, to withdraw our love from ourselves and from others, but that we will choose to keep going anyway.