13 May 2005

Sin and the Sinner

Posted by Oblivion in General | 4:33pm


"Hate the sin, not the sinner" is among those million other sentences that sound hollow and downright illogical. Besides taking compassion too far, it propogates sham among all those ardent believers in cultivated virtue. For, if I were a believer of this tenet, I would not sit and understand the mechanism of hatred, but simply change the object of hatred from sinner to sin. And if the sinner happens to be the driver who makes that deliberate cut to inflict a fracture on my leg, confining me to the hospital bed for months, it's easy enough to see that the very act of trying to change the object from sinner to sin makes the suffering all the more worse. The situation gets more intolerable if the sin happens to be homicide or rape.

Sin, simply, is just an action - a wrong one, by definition, and powerless left to itself. It needs an external force (a person) for it to have any effect. Take out the actor and the action does not exist. If there is delicious food on the table, and a chap gorges on it and dies as a result, do we blame the food for being tasty or the chap for being stupid? Yes, the tenet actually refers to the inclination of the person to commit a certain harmful deed and not specifically to the deed itself, but that does not make it sound rational either, for the argument that the inclination is non-existent without the exploiter still holds good.

It appears to be the effect of misinterpretation of advaita school of thought. Whatever, such statements do more harm than good. For a person who is Buddha, the problem of hate never occurs because he operates at a totally different plane. So, for him the tenet is meaningless. He doesn't need it. For those who are not, hatred is a reality. A reality that begs acknowledgement, not careful packaging in some spiritual balderdash. So, when one is not free of hatred, what's the point of merely changing the objects? It's a simple displacement of the focus of the problem and not a solution.

Man is unbeatable at his ability for inventions for escape.



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