Comments are for Commenting

In a bid to get involved with my local community, I started reading the websites of a number of my local churches. They all seem to be doing some very good word, and providing very valuable services to the community, such as mother toddler groups, fundraisers and other events.


I found a blogspot account for one of the churches local to me, the St David's Uniting Church, which provides an account of the events that they put on in the church. In one post, here, seems to have been a talk which focused on 'sin'. I would say that this is largely understood as a religious concept, and as is so often the case though we have a general understanding of what 'sin' is, I realised I was unable to actually form a coherent definition that I feel people would agree to. After looking at a few dictionary definitions I found that at it's most basic it is an action which breaks a moral law.


If you click the link you can see the entire post, which isn't particularly controversial, but as I read it I felt that there were two conflicting accounts of what constituted 'sin'. I tried to comment on the post, since that is what the option is there for, but discovered that only the authors of the blog are allowed to comment there, so, having written out my comment, I felt slightly annoyed, and thought I'd post it here instead. Here it is:


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I'm not sure whether I'm misinterpreting what's been written here, but I think some of the thoughts on sin here are inconsistent.


In the third paragraph it says:


"Sin is not so much about moral misbehaviour as about lazy thinking - opting out of thinking for ourselves."


Which, it seems to me, would be advocating critical thinking, however in the next paragraph you say:


"It cannot be sinful to think as we have been taught, rather the sin is to refuse insights which are given to us, which would keep us honest."


Unless I am misunderstanding, you seem to be saying that you should both 'think for yourself' and also 'think as you were taught', which would seem to be contradictory.


I'm unclear if your sentence "think as we have been taught" refers to a method / way of thinking or whether it just means 'believe what you are told (presumably by someone in religious authority).


Apologies if I've simply misunderstood.


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I personally do believe it is very important to think for yourself, and to think critically. If the second point raised does imply that it is good to simply believe what you are told, I would vehemently disagree. They have phrased it very misleadingly if that is what they are suggesting, travelling an interesting linguistic route to justify simply believing as the church says. Unfortunately I was unable to ask them directly, so I may never know what they actually intended.