WHAT IS SIN? WHAT RIGHT DOES MAN HAVE TO MAKE A RULE THAT IF VIOLATED IS SIN? BAPTISM IS FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN. HOW MANY ARE BAPTIZE BY THEIR OWN FREE WILL? DOES RELIGION USE GULIT AS A MEANS TO CONTROL THE MEMBERSHIP? THE HISTORY OF CONFESSTION IS OF GREAT INTEREST BACK IN THE 1300s. CHRIST WROTE THE RULES ONLY IN THE DUST AT THE TIME THE WOMAN WAS TO BE STONED YET HE PREACHED TO LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOUR SELF. GOD IS THE FORGIVER.

I think, in the Christian mindsets, the concepts of 'sin' and 'debt' are interchangeable in certain ways.

People who keep calling me a 'sinner' sure seem to think I owe them something.

Correction:

Is it forgiveness of sins/trespasses or forgiveness of debts? There is a significant difference of opinion in the ranks of the historical Jesus exegetes.

continued below:

Is it forgiveness of sins/trepasses or forgiveness of debts? There is a significant difference of opinion in the ranks of the historical Jesus exegetes.

e.g.

"Hal Taussig

In Jesus Before God. The Prayer Life of the Historical Jesus. (Polebridge, 1999), Taussig develops his thesis that the Lord's Prayer is a collection of several prayer lines that were significant to the early Q community. His discussion of "Forgive us our debts" occurs on pages 89-92 and represents a good example of his argument. He concludes:

Situating this sentence prayer within its social context makes clear that it arose from certain specific situations in which Jesus found himself. It did not, within the lifetime of Jesus, belong to the Lord's Prayer, which was the product of the generations after Jesus. ... after Jesus was gone his followers in Galilee formulated a general prayer in his name, combining fragments from Jesus' own prayers with other material to create an institutionalized prayer in Jesus' name.

As the various versions of this Lord's Prayer from the second half of the first century were passed on, the meanings of the individual prayer sentences were generalized and taken out of context. The sentence prayer about forgiveness made a gradual transition from forgiving one another's debts to forgiveness of sins."

With respect to prayers in general, once again:

Put down your rosaries and prayer beads and stop worshiping cows and bowing to Mecca five times a day.

Instead work hard at your job, take care of your family and of aging parents, volunteer at a soup kitchen, donate to charities and the poor and continue to follow the Commandments of your religion or any good rules of living as gracious and good human beings.

And lets all hope there indeed is a place called Heaven!!!

As long as the 'we're in the forgiveness business' doesn't (and it does, very often) get spun around to 'We've trademarked and copyrighted forgiveness, thus can turn around and turn 'forgiveness' into an *accusation,* ...the usual insulting double-binds of "I forgive you for being such a sinner, you, person-unlike-me, you."

Forgiveness is an important part of human emotional experience, of course, where appropriate: my own faith has somewhat different view of it, not defining our lives themselves as though it were all about some tally of 'sins and judgements and absolutions' to be added up or ignored at some 'last judgement,' in the first place.

In our daily lives, we do a lot of 'unbinding' or otherwise 'letting go.' Breathing out grudges and whatnot. For this we're often accused of being 'unforgiving' where many Christians will absolve themselves of harms done and continue in the same patterns as if they were 'pure,' ...in fact, when confronted with harm they are doing, will so often point somewhere else and say, 'Oh, yeah, look over there, that's worse.'

Kind of a complex subject, however important. Too often, one hears 'prayers' directed with hostility, 'Forgive these innocent people, O, Lord, for being such terrible inhuman evil sinners,'

...which is just another way of calling people names, really. There's no *reconciliation* about it, only claims that someone who hasn't harmed you has done you some injury. false witness, if you like.

Another thing that too often gets *backwards.* Particularly in terms of claiming to people that they're so innately horrible that they need to constantly kneel and beg for 'forgiveness' to the very people who are dehumanizing them.

Care is needed in these regards. Holding onto stress is of course, unhealthy, but so is using the idea of 'forgiveness' to *create it.*

I wonder if Christians/Catholics feel we should forgive Sens. Kennedy, Reid, Pelosi, Connell, McConnell for their double-dealing with property investments and national health care to the tune of tens of millions, if not more, during this period of national financial distress?

And if we should forgive them, should forgiveness mean they continue to remain unaccountable for their acts? Does forgiveness mean getting off scott free? Or should forgiveness follow justice?

Just wondering....