--- In [email protected], "Buck" <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote:
> Call it what you like, the good,
> the fair, the just etc. of antiquity.
> Yup, but essentially it is
> virtuous vs. sinful on a
> spiritual scale of 'life-supporting'.
The opposite of virtue is vice, not sin. A religious person might call vice
'sin', but 'sin' is not recognised outside of religious thought.
For example, in the Torah, the tablets of the ten commandments were destroyed.
God then replaced them. Except the commandments on the new tablets were
different, e.g., 'Thou shalt not boil a calf in its mothers milk' was one of
the restored commandments. Few today would call boiling a calf this way a sin.
Vegetarians and animal lovers maybe.
An atheist might get enlightened, but would not give any value to the word sin
as he/she moved 'up' on the 'spiritual scale'. 'Spiritual scales' seem to be
devices by which one can manipulate the emotive behaviour of another by
comparing them to the scale, relying on such a person's emotional immaturity
and weakness to nudge or browbeat them into submission. This is the opposite of
the technique for transcending, which is to gently let go.
The unified field is everything. If you want to know what god wants, just watch
what happens in the universe at large. Sin is either meaningless as a concept
or it must be a property of god.
Someone once asked Maharishi where bad thoughts came from, presumably since
thought arises out of the 'field of pure intelligence'. His answer was such a
thought was 'rotten to the core'.
If you want to bring sin as a concept into the game of enlightenment, you have
a lose-lose situation especially in the modern Western world where traditional
religious sentiment is slipping.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
--Epicurius (b.341 BCE)
