Chapter V
Sin
The Forerunner: Vol. V, No. 5 (p. 130-136)
May 1914
In the slow, irregular growth of our understanding of ethics one of the heaviest arresting forces is the ancient race-concept of "Sin."
Sin, as such, has not the faintest connection with ethics. It is a wholly arbitrary term, applied to various acts and lines of conduct in accordance with primitive religious views; views held at a period long before even our present meager knowledge of the real laws of right and wrong.
Race ideas grow one from another, in long lines of slow development, modified from age to age by those "mutations," those splendid leaps forward in our race-psychology made by the great founders of new religions.
Even they have always felt the influence of the more ancient thought, and have struggled mightily against it, as in the valiant protest of Jesus—"Ye have heard it said by them of old time"—"But I say unto you—"—and he did, speaking "as one having authority, not as the scribes."
In view of this glorious revolt of new percepts is it not amusing to note how the later compilers, striving to harmonize the New Testament with the old–(that deadly mistaken compromise) carefully wrote in from time to time-"And this he said that it might be fulfilled which was written—"
Fancy that splendid iconoclast, whose teaching was in such rampant opposition to "that which was written," carefully looking up his authorities and arranging his doings accordingly!
Yet in spite of the grand independence of its founder the Christian religion is heavily modified by the ancient Hebraic views and theories, as they in turn carried on the more ancient Assyrian, and still remoter Chaldean mythology.
In all this long line of psychological heredity, possibly the oldest idea of all is that of Sin.
Sin is disobedience, the obverse of the pre-social virtue of obedience, found, as we have seen, in the animal species long preceding ours.
As the mother-culture gave way to masculine specialization, we find the primitive medicine man giving orders and punishing disobedience; and very early indeed his practical mind developed the basic concept that the wickedest thing of all was not to do what he said.
This attitude was imputed to the early deities as soon as they became strongly visualized. Would that we could represent, as in the cinematograph, the first vague cloudy concept of Personality in the Unknown Forces which impressed that dim and unused mind; and watch it grow, hardening in outline, deepening in color, taking on new attributes, specializing into different gods and goddesses, as the attributes became more varied and irreconcilable, and then, when at last the brain was able to form the greater concept, centralizing again in man's largest thought-one God—The Central Power.
If our pictorial representation were correct it would show how difficult it has been to hold that Great Idea, and how a hierarchy of saints, angels, subdeities with special interests, have been added to ease the strain.
We have frankly divided our deity into three, solemnly asserting that three equals one—and that to doubt this "sacred mystery" is Sin.
"Sin" has accompanied religion all the way up, and is with us yet.
Each religion has its own special sins, carefully arranged, some worse than others, "mortal sins'; some better than others, "venial sins"; and that Formless Terror in the background— "The Unpardonable Sin."
Commands-Disobedience-Punishment-Pardon-Vengeance and Mercy--all these vanish into thin air when we study ethics.
Things are wrong because they are not good for us; because they do not "conduce to the best development of the organism"-Society.
In each religion the Deity is figured as Commanding and Forbidding according to the best ethical precepts of that time, plus a heavy coloring of the ethical percepts of far earlier time, and the special acts thus ordered or prohibited are what we call Sins and Virtues.
In order to compel the desired behavior, this same primitive mind, knowing nothing of the sources of action or how to modify it, could do no better than enlarge its practical systems of reward and punishment, and these, growing as ideas do grow when allowed to dominate the brain, have cast their prodigious shadows down all eternity--an eternity devised to harbor them.
Since a rigid death penalty failed to check misdoers, since even torture, in hideous excess, proved incapable of affecting the imaginations of other newmade sinners, so as to produce better conduct, our religious authorities, still innocent either of ethics or of practical psychology, merely pursued their erroneous method to the nth power.
They elaborated the most frightful concept ever produced by the logical action of a misinformed mind-that of Eternal Punishment. With a sort of psychic Saadism they let themselves go in a riot of unspeakable horror, horror such as no mind could hold close and long without insanity, and then eternalized this horror, inventing an eternal capacity for suffering to match the eternal torment.
And this product of a diseased imagination they attributed to God—!
Let us sweep away these cobwebs.
Right and wrong are relative terms.
Right conduct for human beings is conduct known to be beneficial to hu wrong conduct is the reverse.
Right eating is what keeps us well, strong and happy and improving; wrong eating makes us ill, weak, un happy, and stationary or retrogressing.
Is wrong eating, then, a Sin?
We have not been taught so. "Gluttony" was called a sin; and in the Moslem religion it is a sin to drink wine; the Arab is not troubled by gluttony, and the Christian is the most intemperate of all the churches.
We have crudely chalked off streaks and patches of conduct, calling this part virtue, and this part sin-without understanding why, and still less understanding how to most successfully change the conduct.
From the earliest mother-power up through the fierce dominance of newly-enthroned man, and all the dictatorial violence of the solemn priesthoods of old time, we have dealt only with authority.
"Do this—and you shall have a reward."
"Do that-and you shall have a penalty."
"If you do what you are told you are Good." "If you disobey, you are Bad-that is Sin."
Suppose we had used this plan in the development of other lines of conduct?
Take for instance the study of navigation. Here man undertook the task of riding the sea. Right conduct brought him and his vessel safe to port. Wrong conduct meant drowning–but it did not mean damnation. Drowning was enough.
Very slowly, at great cost of life, men learned the art of navigation. It is still a dangerous trade, still costs us heavy loss of life and property, but these difficulties are not complicated by adding to the fear of death the fear of eternal punishment.
Take a simpler, safer art–agriculture. If we do right, and the weather suits, we succeed in raising a crop; if we do wrong-or the weather does we fail. But there is no thought of Sin in our failure.
Take an inter-human process like education. Right conduct on the part of the educator is that which produces the best results in the least time, with the least effort; wrong the reverse. We have made progress in "the virtues" of the educator, and many still "sin"-sin heavily-but they do not call it "sin." Their consciences are not perturbed by their shortcomings.
Or again take that much-vexed field of conduct, the relation of the sexes. Right conduct in this relation is that which produces the best children and the most health and happiness; wrong, the reverse. But we, with that blinding black-and-white poster work of ours, have broadly painted on our harsh distinctions, and called the most vicious over-indulgence "right" if under matrimony, and the purest, sweetest, relation "wrong" if outside that shelter.
We made another broad division of right and wrong between the conduct of the sexes, our famous "double standard"; we have allowed tradition, prejudice, custom and habit to dictate. to us; even science has been blinded by sex-prejudice; so that in this simple and natural relation there is practically no knowledge of real right and wrong. A vicious and degrading marriage, which any clear-eyed child could see was wrong, we maintain to be Right; and what we do call "Sin" is a sin for one of the two co-sinners and not for the other a marvel of ethical bewilderment.
The sense of Sin is one of peculiar distress. It is far beyond the feeling aroused by what we call "a mistake," an "error," a "misplay." One may do wrong, glaringly wrong, in a hundred ways, feel any degree of annoyance and shame, but it is not the "conviction of Sin." That feeling grips at the very roots of sensation-no wonder—it is so very, very old. It brings to the sufferer a bitter combination of shame, remorse, and fear; horrible paralyzing fear. This is because of all those ages of primitive authority and primitive punishment; the iron entered our soul many many thousand years ago—and is there yet.
Suppose we take it out-take it out for good and all.
Right and wrong are questions of law; strong, sure, safe, natural law.
The result of right doing is visible and sure to be earned, securely.
The result of wrong doing is as visible and as secure—from it there is no escape.
These results are not "rewards," or "punishments," they are consequences, inevitable consequences. They cannot be escaped.
It is of no use to pray to the water not to drown you, but one may learn to swim! It is of no use to pray to the harvest to benefit you, but one may eat it.
Prayer, in the sense of a deep renewal of psychic vigor, is a process of proven usefulness; but prayer, in the sense of requesting a Personal interference with the Person's own laws, is a process of proven uselessness.
Let us look back at the record of Human Sin. It is very dreadful, is it not?
Now let us look at it under another name as the record of Human Progress.
We, who were but beasts, have become so largely human that we even now look forward to World-Peace, and have begun to work for it.
We, who strayed from the clean sex-relation of other animals into all manner of uncleanness, are even now looking forward to Chastity for both sexes; to light where there was darkness; to a Conscious Motherhood, a Reverent Fatherhood that will literally regenerate the world.
We have got far enough to form these new ideals and to begin to work toward them. We, who grew from wild freedom into slavery, a slavery which is practically co-existent with history, have just outgrown it; have rushed madly into a brief period of contract labor. and are, even now, grasping the idea that to work is the essential condition of human life, of social health, and that to live on the labor of others without return of one's own labor is social parasitism and disease.
We have grown splendidly, have learned much, have done well.
Ah-but think of the awful record of failure, cruelty and crime!
Is it so terrible? What have we a right to expect? What is it likely that such a race of beings, in such and such conditions would do?
Does anyone in his senses expect to learn so much as a language-with no mistakes? Or expect a child, never so well brought up, to reach maturity without ever a fault?
We have had to learn-Life.
We are a child-race, and there was no parent-race to bring us up. We have had to experiment all the way, and it was long indeed before we knew enough, before we had sufficient range of vision-to judge of our race mistakes.
Personal conduct, in personal relations, in local conditions, we might have learned fairly well, if we had not always had the handicap of prepotent ancestral ideas; but social conduct—there is where our great wrongdoing lies.
The limited individual ethics was easily learned, the hardly less limited family ethics was not too difficult, though heavily obscured by sex-prejudice and tradition, and arbitrarily modified by religion; but social ethics, the real ethics of humanity–we never knew. Great souls throbbed to it–Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, Moses, but no religion felt it —until Jesus came. And the religion bearing his name speedily ignored it, and fell back on the old individualism; the worry of the eternally-elongated personal soul about its Reward-or Punishment.
Until we could grasp the idea of the Organic Unity of Society we could have no solid basis of ethics-and that idea, though now set clearly before the world, is still not generally accepted.
Under a merely personal view of ethics we could never understand human conduct. With no special psychology we could never learn how to modify human conduct. With the arbitrary demarcations of religion to still further blind us in a study of the real laws of our nature, and that special and peculiar check which we alone among all living things have suffered under-the persistence of outgrown ideas and customs-the wonder is not that humanity has "sinned" but that it has been so amazingly virtuous.
To the modern student, aware of something of the laws of human progress, the study of history with all its pathos, all its horror, all its shame, becomes as richly sweet as a garden in the spring, with the brave unfolding of lovely qualities against the continuous pressure of ignorance, ancient falsehood and wrong.
The natural love of man and woman has grown strong and beautiful in the face of all the record of outrage and cruelty in marriage and out.
The "love of comrades" has appeared and reappeared, waxed stronger and warmer, in the face of all our ages of warfare, and is now kindling to a mighty blaze; a steady fire that shall warm the world and put an end to bloodshed.
The love of work, our innate human passion, the force that drives the artist to his canvas, the inventor to his machines, the sailor to the sea, has held its own, has made good, is now pushing steadily into recognition, in spite of slavery and traditions of slavery, wages, and the cruelty of wages.
Sin? Can you imagine animals turning into Christians by the slow process of prehistoric and historic evolution without doing something wrong?
We have no evidence of the possibility of any child, any learner of anything, making unbroken progress without mistakes. One of our worst mistakes was to call our errors "sin."
"The soul that sinneth it shall die," says the sternly convinced Ancient. That was when sin was held to be an entirely private matter. What we are now learning, in our new knowledge of social organic unity, is that our misdeeds cannot be traced to personality but to collective responsibility.
Let us consider one particular "sin," such as unchastity in a woman. Here is one girl, reared in the sweet seclusion of a well-ordered home, trained in all fine sentiment and clean emotion, fed on the noblest literature and art, associating only with people of similar upbringing, and, furthermore, educated not only in strong self-command, but in such noble vigor of physical development as gives her a clean, strong body with normal instincts.
Here is another girl, born of irresponsible, weak-willed degraded parents, feeble in both physical and mental inheritance, growing up in miserable conditions, in crowded rooms where both sexes, of all ages, live together; accustomed to the lowest standards in idea and language; uneducated in any noble sense, cut off from all those fine inheritances and associations which so uphold the other, and so ill-fed, ill-clothed and overworked that she has a feeble body, overridden by its ill-balanced desires.
If these two girls each yield to a temptation of sex, is the "Sin" the same?
It has been shown, in cool, comforting figures, that chastity increases in proportion to the floor-space occupied by the family; just as the height of children increases, similarly, something like a quarter of an inch for each added room, up to the normal size of house—and child. Now if unchastity, in a deadly average of frequency, increases as the room for decent living decreases, and if unchastity is a sin-whose sin it it?
Again it has been shown, in Glasgow, when municipal lighting was begun and the authorities lit up not only streets and alleys, but the dark courts, hallways, stairs and "wynds," that this increase of light was followed by a proportionate decrease in the city's crime.
The "city's" crime! The regular average of crime, appearing in humanity when humanity is subjected to certain living conditions.
If these acts are sins, and. if they depend upon conditions of housing, lighting, and the like-whose sins are they?
Suppose you tell a child that it is a sin to steal.
Then suppose you set before the child a peculiarly tempting delicacy. Then suppose you go away and leave him alone with the temptation. Then suppose you withhold food from the child, so that he is hungry, starving, weakened from privation-and still the dainty is there within reach—and the child eats it.
Is that a sin?-Whose?
It has been shown in carefully noted records in Belgium that a rise in the price of bread is accompanied by a decrease in marriage and an increase in prostitution.
Being hungry does not increase evil desires, but it does decrease resistance.
We must recognize at last that we stand or fall together. The conduct of a given community is the conduct of that much human nature, under those local conditions, and also under the pressure of the psychic environment, the inherited mental attitudes, the educational influences, the social customs, the common habits of the people.
Into this complex of forces modifying action, the influence of religion has thrust its tremendous force; not to understand and alter the conditions which resulted in the objectionable conduct, but to placard the face of life with its arbitrary "Right" and "Wrong" signs, and to call on the Individual Conscience, the Individual Will, to choose between them.
In our legendary version of The Fall of Man this method did not work, even with the Deity Himself giving express commands of a very simple nature. The Apple Tree was stronger-plus the creeping Intelligence of that Old Serpent.
Furthermore, in our continued account, this method always failed. We have the record of that people who fondly imagined they were better than any other people, and who wrote their own story of themselves. According to that story they never succeeded in avoiding sin, though prophet after prophet arose to threaten, direct and exhort them.
Even in the Christian Theory we find humanity given up as a bad job–they simply would sin; they never could learn how to behave, and so they had to be "bought with a price"-not being able to earn their reward by good conduct.
We have flatly accepted Sin as essential to human nature; have accepted the ghastly theory of eternal damnation, and then the ameliorating theory of salvation-not by improved behavior, but by the sacrifice of another to buy us off from punishment.
We do not have to believe this any longer. We may hold a solid knowledge of God, founded, not on questionable records but on the book of nature itself, a God seen at work, and too honestly respected for us to believe disgraceful stories about him.
We may hold a splendid sense of help and comfort from Jesus, that colossal figure of Human Love, who saw so much of the real law of our collective life, and so pathetically failed to make others see it. The figure of Jesus will stand higher and higher in our later history, when the truth of his position is at last admitted and when we turn our attention from calling him "Lord! Lord!" and begin to do the things which he said.
But we may drop Sin out of minds, for good and all.
Have you done wrong? That is a pity. We all do, more or less.
Have you done more wrong than others? Well-if you have, that is more pity still.
What, then, should be your attitude and ours toward this evil conduct?
The first thing is, of course, to stop it. If you cannot stop it Society has a right to protect itself from you, as a mere temporary measure of self-defense; but the important thing is for Society to find out what made you do it-and stop that.
Here, for instance, is a man who is drunk, and commits a murder. This is bad conduct, both the murder and getting drunk.
Society punishes him as a murderer.
It may even punish him for getting drunk.
But only a few members of society seek to put an end to drunkenness, and so to many murders and other evils.
Even they, in a downright primitive manner, seek to end drunkenness by removing the Demon Rum. They are only lately beginning to study the two questions: Why do men drink? and Why do men sell liquor?
They say to this man: "You shall not drink. And to this man: "You shall not sell liquor." But they surely must observe that even with the demon rum in evidence all men are not drunk.
Why, then, do some men drink while others do not? What classes drink most, and why? What conditions tend to make men drink?
Here is "Sin" if ever there was one; a form of indulgence which injures Society in the loss of millions upon millions of dollars, and in mind, life, health and happiness far beyond that.
But drunkenness is not to be stopped by damnation for drunkards–nor by salvation for drunkards, either.
It is to be stopped by Society as a whole, when it, collectively, shall face the evil, study the causes, and remove them.
No time, no energy, should be wasted in Remorse on the one hand or in condemnation on the other.
Punishment does not stop any evil. Punishment is always after the event—and the event is repeated, by someone else, owing to the action of the same forces which governed the earlier offender.
When we drop the whole theory of Sin out of our minds for good and all; when we recognize that every act of life is "right' 'or "wrong," and that the one most important business of an awakened society is to study human conduct and what modifies it, then we shall lose forever the heaviest weight, the darkest cloud, that ever rested on humanity.
Losing this sense of Sin we come out into a clear bright world; a world where things are safe and solid and reliable; a world wherein the past becomes a useful record book whereby we may learn what not to do, for the most part, and also, some extent, the precious proven truths of what we should do.
This new world blazes with hope.
We have not Sinned.
We are not Dammed.
We do not need to be Saved.
Our business is To Learn and To Grow.
We have The Power of God lifting always within, and the Light of Reason to walk by. There is no dark mystery over our conduct.
Bound together by every law of our nature, and finding our highest pleasure in mutual service, we, the Human Race, need only find out in mutual helpfulness, in long patience, in growing love, first, what is the best way to behave—to our common advantage; and then what is the best way to induce people to behave so.
We have to learn that ultimate forgiveness which forgives ourselves.
We must drop that grudge against our ancestors which has been nursed through theory-the theory that "In Adam's fall we sinned all"; and with it that baseless, contemptible meanness which shunted Adam's supposititious guilt upon Eve.
There is no greater horror in the whole period of human consciousness than in our theories of Sin, Punishment, Eternal Damnation, and there is no greater meanness, no more cowardly piece of blackguardism in that same period than the unanimous haste with which our ancestors laid the blame of the whole world's evil upon woman.
All this we may now outgrow.
(To be continued.)