[livingvortex]

Hi all.

Just wanted to pick up on HP's quote from the guy in the church. I feel that it's quite right what he's saying, just wanted clarify the word 'sin' a bit further because I think it's a bit of an unwieldy term which kind of gets peoples heckles up in our atheistic relatavistic society.
I found this quote by Eckhart Tolle from 'A New Earth';

'According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity is one of "original sin". Sin is a word which has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskilfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition......'

So I guess in one sense one does sin if one calls up all that sexual imagery so as to have an orgasm as it generally causes some suffering somewhere down the line (be it to ourselves or others), but it's good to unload a bit of our medieval baggage around 'sinning' because I don't feel it helps us to find our own inner voice around these issues. Yes, I've sinned but in the sense that I've missed the point of existence!