In this essay we discuss what is sin, what has law got to do with sin, what is the difference between sin and evil.
This world is very confused about sin. People think it is about being bad. The world is even more confused about what evil is, thinking it is akin to being very bad. But then mankind does not understand where law fits in with their ideas about sin and evil. What is worse is that humans have no idea how close they are to perfection.
We all know everyone makes mistakes and that we are all tempted to make even bigger errors. We all fail to follow the law, to some degree. Therefore, people do not even entertain the idea of perfection or attaining to perfection.
We cannot even adhere to our new year’s resolutions. How are we to be made perfect?
But what is sin and what relevance has law? Law cannot reveal sin because law is only someone’s opinion as to what good and bad is. The law attempts to make us good, according to someone’s idea as to what constitutes good behaviour.
The law regulates us, assuming those who created the law have the means to enforce the law. That is not always necessarily so.
It is not enough to claim sin is doing bad things and then making laws to stop the bad things from happening, when obviously those who break the law and those who make the law have differing opinions as to what constitutes bad behaviour. Why ought one person’s opinion on what constitutes bad behaviour predominate, simply because they have the physical force to impose their way of thinking onto others?
The law is simply the opinion about what constitutes right behaviour of those who wield the greatest power.
This does not tell us what sin is, it merely tells us what those who wield the legislative power, thinks is wrong.
But what could be wrong? In this world the only possible wrong is being weak, because being weak permits wrong to be done you. Those who make the law attempt to mitigate against this but at the expense of the weak giving them even greater power over them. We have to submit to the law to permit the law to work.
As flawed as this system is, it gives us some insight into the wrong that is being done, that is the nature of sin.
When all is said and done, what does a bad man do, but take from us what does not belong to them. What might be the case, is that they take what does not belong to us either. For stealing to be the foundational sin, our ownership of what they take would need to be uncontested, that is justified. But what is actually the case?
We take assets and we claim to own them, but how do we establish ownership of assets?
The only way to answer that is to reinvigorate the doctrine of force or the Law of the Jungle, which states that might makes right and the end justifies the means.
But were this true, why do we enact laws to keep the exercise of force at a minimal level? The truth is, the Law of the Jungle is a doctrine that leads to anarchy in the worst possible meaning of the word.
Ownership in this world means you claimed an asset and have the means, direct or indirect, to maintain your claim even in the face of counterclaims. But when looked at in a serious way, what basis has any of our claims to ownership other than our ability to defend our claim or our access to a state that protects our claim for us.
The state claims a jurisdiction as its own. However, the nation is not a natural entity. It is created from violence and claims back up by violence or the possibility of violence. Ownership in this world is no more complicated than a man seeing some land and claiming that it belongs to the king.
It is a meaningless ceremony is the king lacks an army and the means to defend the claim. This makes war the final ajudicator of who owns what. On a lower level the state may tell us wew own something and we may have papers and the law to support our claim to something, but if we do not have the means to defend this claim, a criminal can easily deprive us of it.
Without the power of the state to back up some of our claims, they claim itself would be meaningless.
If all of this is true, what does a claim of ownership even mean?
We are familiar with the idea of private and public ownership, but despite the way some people talk about them, they are different more in degree than substance. Both private and public ownership models involve the states hegemonic power and powerful individuals who actually exercise the power.
Personal ownership is a third form of ownership, but it relates only to those things used personally to maintain life. We can understand the need for and validity of, personal ownership even if it does not necessarily have any greater objectivity or legitimacy than the other two forms.
It can be legitimized and justified just on the basis of necessity if nothing else. We need to own basic assets to survive. However, there is an element associated with personal ownership that needs further discussion. When mankind first entered the world he had to till and herd and fashion implements for his use. The things he used and claimed were fashioned by his own hand. He had labor invested in them which gave some legitimacy to his claim.
We all know things such as books and music are claimed by their authors and no one disputes Mozart’s right to his music, and name remains associated with the pieces he wrote despite how long ago they were written and how many times by how many people they have been played.
The same with War and Peace. Regardless of how many persons read the book or how many years go by, Leo Tolstoy remains the recognized author the world over.
That which we create, we own. That which we did not create we cannot own and ought to lay no claim to. When we make a claim of ownership against something we did not create, we invariable create a liability, that is a contested form of ownership with two or more persons laying claim to the same object.
As we mentioned, claiming things created for personal use has a sense of legitimacy to it. But what happens when we stop producing for personal use and begin to mass produce for commercial purposes?
What happens when the artisan stops making just for himself and begins to produce a single item full time and perhaps hires apprentices to help out?
In the first instance he makes something for his own use. He puts his labor in and consume the value of this labor in the use of the item created. In one sense he is living off of the fruits of his own labor.
Even when he begins to create a professional or commercial product, he is creating a community that lives off the avails of its labor. This is akin to the church.
Small-scale production, or artisan activity pushes the cycle of consumption up one level, but the final result is not much different than what we found with personal use of what is called subsistence culture.
It is when we get to the industrial scale of production that a subtle but genuine change occurs. The industrialist or capitalist does not live by labor but by expropriation of the labor of others, and this takes a complex set of relationships akin to a protection racket.
The state creates its own legitimacy and justifiers. Which is what any protection racket does.
There is a sharp and dramatic line of demarcation between someone or some community that lives by its own labor, whether consumed personally or as a community, and someone who does not produce anything of value, yet consumes the things produced by others.
This has a correlation with the situation of an individual. We are all born dependent on others, primarily our parents. Over time we all mature physically, but not all mature spiritually. It is from this fact that we derive our understanding of sin.
There was not much opportunity to live as a parasite in the days of yore. Everyone had to work to survive. Even the king often engaged in necessary works like the design and building of fortifications. But as time when on and production became more and more specialized the role of the administrator became more ephemeral and became totally disconnected from what he or she was ostensibly administrating. From the end of the mercantile era and its guilds management became largely divorced from anything productive and became focused on the manipulation of financial vehicles.
Profit and tazes are the two main financial vehicles parasites use to exploit labor but there are many others. The trick is to act as a gateway to something the productive sector needs. Its akin to setting up a toll road.
If the early days man was able to reap what he needed from the earth. Later on prior to industrialization he needed manufactured goods to work with, but these were still the products of skilled craftsmen trading their labor and skills for the labor and skills of other craftsmen.
The point is, at the beginning of time, people had access to the assets needed to carry out a trade. Because of this direct access to the needed assets, the Labour Theory of Value could be used to determine the price of things. There were no inputs other than the asset cost and the value that was added to the asset through work.
Now we have all kinds of financial vehicles that allow people to make claims against the labor of others.
But there is no legitimacy in these claims, because the value of all things is due to the asset and the value of the labor added. Everything else is parasitism and it is this, the parasitism of some, that causes all of the problem of this world.
Take out the illicit claims and we have peace and prosperity; war will be no more.
Sin is dishonesty and in practice or application it leads to parasitism. We own only what we create, there is no other basis for ownership, than this. What we create with our minds and the value we add with our labor, belongs to us. Everything else is an illicit claim and causes liabilities.
One cannot claim what is not theirs, without creating a liability. The true nature of a liability is an illicit claim made against an asset or the value it represents, owned by its creator.
All sin is the imposition of claims on that which one did not create, this is aided and abetted by the state.
The state is the mother of all abominations, which are claim against things which one did not create.
These claims destroy value, they destroy industrious, they destroy the peace.
