SIN, n: an action (thought, speech, or deed) that promotes the self against the welfare of that self’s community.
Many lives of living things have been sacrificed over millennia, promoting human selves over the welfare of the biotic communities in which they live – a sin – to produce the paper, and latterly the electronic data stores and the devices to house and display those stores, on which humans have agonized over the definition and meaning of sin, ignoring the simple and sufficient definition provided above.
The difficulty is not with the definition of the word but with the clear implication of that definition, which is that a life without sin is a life without self-care, and that a life without self-care soon ceases.
The argument, therefore, is over the mass and volume of individual self-care decisions (that is, of sins) that the community containing those individuals is prepared to accept as the cost of doing business – humanity’s most colossal and treacherous greased pig.
JUSTICE, n. Demand for the restoration, by (a segment of) a community, of a previously-agreed-upon, community-wide, set of acceptable sins. Typically accompanied by a demand for recompense, to the aggrieved party, from the party deemed guilty of sins that have transgressed the previous agreement – or, that conformed to the agreement but that the accusing party no longer finds advantageous to themselves acceptable.
The call for “justice” commonly represents an attempt by one individual, or community of individuals, to promote its self against the welfare of the rest of the community – which is a sin.
PENALTY, n. The minimum legally-sanctioned recompense for sin. Commonly a logical, balanced, measured response to a given sin – which means that it is commonly acceptable to nobody. PENANCE: the process of paying the smallest possible portion of a prescribed penalty.
ATONEMENT, n. Recompense for sin that satisfies both the legal and the emotional requirements of those demanding the recompense. Commonly accomplished to the satisfaction of all, if at all, only by the dead.
FORGIVENESS, n. First in the Holy Trinity of “release from sin” words, commonly confused, misunderstood, and misapplied. Forgiveness is, and is only, the declaration that a community will not seek (further) recompense from a self deemed to have sinned against that community.
GRACE, n. Second Person of this Trinity, being a declaration that the self deemed to have sinned may resume at least partial participation in the community.
If it serves the purposes of the community, grace may be granted without forgiveness, and vice versa. Neither grant relief from the memory of the sin, and both are conditional upon the sin not being repeated where any member of the community can detect it – unless the community prospers from allowing members to repeat (certain) sins, at which point it becomes a self seeking advantage against the welfare of the wider community of which it is a part … which is a sin.
PARDON, n. Third Person, in which the community declares that it will forget the sins committed against it. The pardoned self stands in need of neither forgiveness nor grace, as the events triggering these needs, by definition, did not happen.
Universally craved, especially by those facing the stark realities of proper atonement. Rarely offered, almost never offered in sincerity, the claims of religious organizations notwithstanding. Such claims are recruiting ploys intended to prosper the religious organization, a “self”, against the welfare of that self’s community. Which is a sin.