Is Sin A Useful Concept?

I'm not at all sure that sin is a useful concept in my faith. At least not in the sense of stuff that you know is wrong but choose with full consciousness to do anyway. So very little of my experience of either hurting people or being hurt by them has anything to do with true malice. Rather, what I see is that most people, most of the time, are doing the best they can at that moment. This doesn't mean that we're making the best possible choices, or that what we do choose is loving or just, but I think it has less to do with the fact that we're evil and more to do with the fact that we're weak.

I get confused and frustrated by the church's traditional teaching that on one hand, sin is a free choice, one that can be avoided, but on the other hand, everyone sins every day. How many people truly do something thinking “I know this is wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway”? It seems more likely that we don't consider the moral implications at all, or that we justify what we're doing based on our own needs. I'm not saying that makes the actions good, but it does seem to change them from malice to ignorance or desperation. And one can make the accusation of willful blindness, but again, how often does someone really say to themselves “I'm going to avoid knowing about the moral dimensions of the world in order to make it easier to focus only on myself”? To me, it seems almost more like un-willful blindness. To use the words of one of the sometimes guest preachers at my church, there's “not enough to us” to will to see the truth. We frequently live in a moral haze because that's the best we can do.

And then when intense emotions get involved it's even more difficult. Who hasn't done things in anger that they've later regretted? As a society, we hold people responsible for their actions in anger, as we must in order to have any sort of useful legal system. But we're all familiar with the struggle of learning to master our emotions: children claim that they couldn't help hitting their siblings or mouthing off because they were so mad; parents counter that yes, they can help it and being mad isn't an excuse. But even as adults we have the experience of losing our tempers and feeling not fully in control, of having our emotions feel utterly overwhelming. And I'm not sure any of us can really be sure how much control we have. We're all familiar with being too stressed, too upset, too angry, too depressed to really connect with other people. We say things like “I really can't handle anything else right now” meaning not that it's physically impossible but that our mental and emotional reserves are strained. Sometimes we successfully go beyond what we thought we could do; other times we stretch ourselves past the breaking point and become emotionally overwhelmed and ineffective. It seems clear to me that our psychological resources are limited, just as our physical resources are. Unlike our physical resources, however, it's very hard to tell, even in ourselves, what's true resource limitation and what's laziness or selfishness. It's hard to tell when we're truly overwhelmed and when we just let ourselves snap. I do think we have some free will, but it's really hard to tell how much, and so it's really hard to tell just how morally culpable we are. Original sin has less to do with fruit and more to do with a brain that's still in beta.