Ideas Shouldn't Be Used To Trap Us
Moving past limitation of sin and labels
We feel lost when, being so focused on finding the "right" path, that we can't see the opportunities that surround us. We encourage freedom of imagination in our kids because we don't want them to get locked into the sin of bad habits. We entreat each other to think outside the box when confronted with adversity and seemingly insurmountable struggles. Corporations hire coaches and gurus to help make the stagnant, movable again. Our very existence as a species is due to the variations possible within the seeming limitations of genetics. Life changes expands, and manifests in new ways precisely because it is not caught in a singular way of being.
As in life, so then in every human being. Living is ever-expansive because our potential is not limited by any single identity or story of who we are. Being trapped, stagnant, and confined is what occurs when we get locked into a narrow vision of who we are and therefore what we are capable of achieving. This is true of ourselves and, given the interconnectedness of relational reality, of those we look upon and judge.
A Restricted Vision
When our minds provide concepts, they’re an amalgamation of various bits of information gelled into a whole. At no time do any of the individual pieces make the whole, but are understood together by the conceptual label. Even when we use a label for one person, for instance, we’re doing so by mentally drawing connections between that person and all the other instances that fall under the framework of that label. This is one of the cognitive truths of our existence, that literally nothing exists in our minds as wholly distinct from everything else. Every time we think we are doing so from within a relational framework, offered up to us in the form we ubiquitously call “experience.”
Thinking relationally means that at the heart of our experience is a tension between individuality and group, between the singular and the multivariate. This is why bigotry is so perniciously awful. Bigotry is the declaration that, based on a single characteristic or behaioral instance, the whole of a person and/or every person who has that same characteristic, can be judged accordingly. Whether it be the immutable characteristics like skin color or sex, or fungible ones like culture or ideological adherence, as soon as the singular has been used to judge the multiple, prejudicial and bigoted thought processes are at work.
The religious dogma of “Sin” is a, predominantly, Christian notion that falls quite easily into this cognitive structure of bigotry and prejudice. It is, itself, a characteristic that, possessed by all of humanity, allows for the entire species to be judged accordingly.
Let no man ever think that he comes anywhere near the standard set by God. God has demanded absolute perfection, and no matter how one measures himself, he falls far short. Some men measure themselves on the basis of human intelligence, some by educational attainment, some by financial success, some by cultural environment, and others by religious performance. But God refuses to accept man on any of these grounds. He has established His perfect standard, and by that standard He measures every man. The Divine verdict in every instance has been the same, “You have come short, you have missed the mark.” (Lehman Strauss, theologian)
Growing up in a Christian household, and later attending a Bible College to study theology, the notion of sin as an issue of “missing the mark” was a common frame, but the details of what that means in practice were often missed.
When a judgment is made, there are, typically, criteria applied. For instance, to not do a job well means that there is an outcome of behaviors that were not met. Or, when someone is judged to have violated a Value, a particular behavior is identified as being contrary to it, as in lying being a violation of honesty. However, notice in the above description concerning the nature of “sin” that behavior is meaningless. The standard being applied is that of “perfection,” an empty concept that serves only to identify what something isn’t. There is simply no way of reaching whatever “perfection” stands for because there is no set of behaviors, as done by a human being, that is capable even in theory of matching it. “Sin” is not a judgment about a person’s behavior, it is a characterological identification of a person’s inherent lack in the face of a standard that has nothing to do with them.
“Sin” isn’t about humanity, it’s about deity.
Let’s be even clearer. “Sin” is a declaration that the wholeness of humanity is to be judged, not by any particular behavior, but by its very nature. This is why, in the Christian salvation message, the result is not that humanity is elevated to perfection, but that it is covered over by the divine. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ….” -Galatians 2:20. Essentially, salvation, in this religious paradigm, is divine narcissism.
Structure of “Sin”
Behavior is secondary to positionality/identity
Action is judged by label, rather than a label being supported by action
All that matters here in this structure is the conceptual label being applied. Behavior ceases to be a window into the multiplicity of human rationale, of the varied reasons, thoughts, and stories of justification. Those justifications and rationales are, or can be, used in dialogue to attempt to match the disparate and competing ethical judgments people have to identify the best way of supporting them. If behavior is secondary to identity, and can only be properly judged by application of a concept, then questions about why a person does what they do are meaningless. We already know. The concept becomes an authoritarian force restricting questions, inquiries, and flexibility of action to a single point of judgment.
The problem of sin is not simply that it's a false idea, though it is, but that it makes us incapable of seeing our humanity as a varied thing to be expressed in a multiplicity of ways. Our varied lives, of layered thought and emotion, become lies and obfuscations hiding us from our 'true selves.' This singular focus inexorably leads to shame and doubt, shame of what we are at our most basic and fundamental level, and doubt about our capacity for change and growth.
The Tyranny of Labels
While “sin” exists in the religious realm of concepts, the cognitive structure of bigotry and prejudice, of judging people by labels rather than by actions, is common in secular circles as well. Any time a label is used to connect an individual with a group, we’re engaging in the same part-to-whole thinking that supports prejudice. The same occurs in personal reflective judgment as well, where any time we select a single behavior we’ve committed, separate it from the interactional and reciprocal reality of our relational lives and make it point to some unalterable core of who we are, we’ve engaged in that same part-whole thinking.
How often have any of us faced failure and in the midst of defeat, callously declared "I'm just a loser," "This is just who I am," or “My diagnosis is acting up again” and "I'm only ever going to be this way"? We may not be thinking of sin, but we are most certainly embarking on a similar path of limitation.
How often have we dismissed a person’s behavior by relegating it to a labeled group practice instead of asking what the intent and thought behind their action was? How often are complex socio-cultural practices that result from multiple variables broken down as simply being “socialism” or “capitalism?”
In both instances of judgment, we’ve curtailed the potential for personal growth and used labels as if they were forces in the universe rather than short-hand descriptions that we apply. In effect what we’ve done is the same that deity has done in its utilization of “sin,” where the only thing that matters is the mind of the person making the judgment.
By selecting merely one potential rationale for our decision-making, we have cut ourselves off from the complexity that is our story-making, the formation of our identities. Instead of the multiple interconnected layers of a full life, we are crushed beneath the weight of simplicity. This process is not concerned with health, well-being, or truth; it is a means of razing the trees to the ground to save the perceived forest.
People Come First
Behavior is primary, helping define the boundaries of a particular label.
A label provides an initial frame for judging behavior but does not remove the potential for others.
Behavior is an attempt by each person to act within the world that is a personal experience as framed by perception. Just as no single Value label encompasses all that a person may do to support it, so then each behavior exists as a window to how the person sees the world. If we don’t ask questions, we’ve ignored and dismissed their humanity for our own.
Every one of us makes decisions based on a variety of factors, explicit and implicit, historical and future-projected, conscious and unconscious. Further, none of us are immune to prejudice, bias, appeal to authority, and the myriad of other emotive-logical cognitive errors. To have a single behavior define the whole of a person is to place the need for righteous judgment (sin) above and beyond that of humanistic understanding.
Judgment is not, here, an authoritarian vertical relationship of declarative statements, but a problem-solving horizontal relationship between people navigating changing needs and desires. An understanding of ourselves and others begins where morality does, within the relational network that is the heart of our humanity.
Individual actions will still be judged, but such can be used as a window to figuring out how a person sees the world differently than we do, and, where errors can be identified, build paths for stepping into better versions of ourselves.
Growth, understood within the scale of human progress, is a dance between what we believe ourselves capable of and the relationships that provide a structure for how we socially construct our ethics. We can more flexibly respond to life’s difficulties by stretching the bounds of our empathy to touch the strands of our humanity that bind us together.