CAN
A SINNER DO GOOD?
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NOBODY IS
ENTIRELY FREE FROM SIN
YOU WILL
BE BLAMED FOR FORGOTTEN SINS
ABOUT SIN
Sin is an offence against God in thought, word, deed or omission. The Church teaches that all wrongdoing of any
kind is God’s business. He decides what
is wrong and he is boss. You must be
motivated by the wish to obey God when you do good otherwise it only looks good
but is really sinful.
In the Roman Catholic Church you will be instructed that there are two
kinds of sin: mortal sin and venial sin.
Mortal sin is sin that cuts you away from God’s
friendship leaving you his enemy.
Christianity asserts that its just punishment is everlasting
punishment. An example is drunkenness or
adultery (1 Corinthians 6:9,10). Grace
is God’s power that works inside you to make you pleasing to him. Mortal sin kills it why is why it is called
mortal. It kills the soul’s relationship
with God and also kills you by making you deserve death for the Bible says the
wages of sin is death and that because of sin all die. So sinning mortally is not just a bad thing
to do but it is also murderous. It is an
attempt to kill yourself out of spite towards God. The Catholic Church teaches that only good works
done when you are not separated from God by mortal sin gain merit and reward
from God. If you are living in sin and
give all your money to the poor it will do nothing for you. The Church says that was what Paul meant when
he said that no matter what good he would do even dying for God, it would amount
to nothing if he didn’t have charity (1 Corinthians 13). By charity the Church says he meant a mortal sin
free love for God and neighbour.
Venial sin is sin that does not terminate the fellowship. Venial is just a weakening of your friendship with God and is not as bad as mortal.
The Church claims that all sins are grave for they offend such a good God but that all sins are not mortal. Incidentally, the Koran asserts that only certain kinds of sin, the allegedly graver sins, put you in Hell (Sura 53:32).
To commit a mortal sin you have to have full knowledge of what you are doing and its seriousness and to do it freely.
If God exists then wrongdoing is worse than it would be if he did not. If there is no God I only hurt myself and others when I do wrong. But if I believe that God exists my wrong is made worse for I am offending him too. I mean to be worse than I would be if I didn’t believe in God. The Church claims to be the true Church and if it is it makes tons of extra sins or compounds the guilt. If I believe in the Church I will have loads of extra things to do wrong than I would have if I didn’t believe at all. So it is wrong to believe in either God or sin which is offending him. Religion makes you worse when you sin. It degrades you. This is evil for I should come first when my own existence is the only thing I am most sure of. I should only have beliefs that don’t accuse me of evil unnecessarily and exaggerate my evil. And original sin, the sin I allegedly carried from my conception because of Adam is a far bigger insult to me for though I am most sure of my existence I am told that I have to carry that sin though it is not my fault. The doctrine implies that I should not put myself first when God allowed that sin to stain me and demean me.
The doctrine that venial sin exists contradicts the existence of God. If God exists he is infinite love. Therefore to insult infinite love even slightly is offending what is infinitely good and though the malice is finite in quantity it is infinite in intent. For example, when you sin, you prefer sin to God so you are rejecting a relationship with an infinitely perfect being. You would do the same if your malice could do him infinite harm. Sin does harm God in the sense that it is against goodness and against his will. To be against goodness is to be against the way things should be. And if there should be a God you are against that. To will evil to exist is to try to open a Pandora’s box. So all sin then is mortal. A mortal sin rejects what is good and replaces it with artificial good. The mortal sinner cares about what he thinks or wants to be good not what IS good. So his relationships and good works are all expressions of this attitude and are actually evil and abhorrent in the sight of God. To reject God is to reject others too though the sinner will not act as if he does that. So the sinner only wants others for his own pleasure no matter what he does for them for as long as he doesn’t love good as it really is he cannot truly value them. He is a phoney. The Catholic Church by inventing sins and condemning things that should not be condemned is only destroying love. It is making people like this by making them think they are sinners. He who does what he thinks is wrong still sins even if he is wrong for he still had malice and pride in his heart.
NOBODY IS
ENTIRELY FREE FROM SIN
Official Catholic doctrine teaches, “It is not a question of the man
doing Penance being one who says ,’Well, Lord, I think I’ve lived today pretty
perfectly. I prayed generously and
faithfully. I’ve loved my neighbour more
than adequately – no failure there. I
honestly don’t think I’ve failed you at all.
So really, for a man who loves you as well as I do, there’s nothing more
except some work of supererogation: so I’ll do this bit of Penance’. No, the man who does Penance is one who says,
‘Lord, the end of another messed-up day. I let you down at every turn. I’ve lived for myself all through. You’re not giving the basic graces I need. Lord, please…I’m serious: so I’ll do this”
(page 4, Friday Penance, John C Edwards SJ).
The First Epistle of John claims that anybody who says he has no sin is a
liar and the truth of God is not in him at all.
It does not say it just means people who think they have never sinned or
people who think they do not sin any more but used to. So clearly it means both. This tells us that nobody alive is completely
free from sin. They always have some sin
in them. If all sin will be punished with
eternal damnation then there is no hope except by somebody like Jesus keeping
the law of God for us in our place.
Romans 3 teaches that all are sinful and nobody is an exception. It speaks in the present tense. It says that the reason nobody could be saved
by obeying the Law of Moses was because nobody can keep it right despite it
making provisions for forgiveness from God.
That means we are all sinners and never have a clean moment.
In Isaiah 64:6, the prophet says that we and all our right ways are filthy rags before God. He says we so he included himself too. And he would have lived like a holy man and he claimed to be totally evil.
Jeremiah
As St Augustine observed in Book 21, Chapter 27, of his City of God, Jesus
in Matthew 6 gave out the Lord’s Prayer and immediately after stressed that you
cannot be forgiven your sins unless you forgive first and indicated that it
should be said as much as possible for it was the best prayer that he was
hinting that all of us are continually in sin.
The doctrine that we are never completely pure is a logical consequence
of the doctrine of Moses and Jesus that we must love God totally and with all
our hearts meaning we serve ourselves and others the way God commands so that
it is really God who is being served. We
could never manage that in all things.
The black and white attitude which lies behind the Bible’s attempt to convict everybody of sin is dangerous. Many of the supposedly good and evil things we do are really neutral – as bad as they are good or neither if you like. If consequences have any bearing on morality or right and wrong at all then you have to believe that there are actions which are neutral.
Christianity teaches that temptation is not a sin but giving into it is a sin. But temptation will be a sin if you don't do everything possible to silence it. For example, if you feel sexual desire and just make a cup of tea you are not silencing the temptation. You need to do something you don't like and that you don't enjoy to quench the desire and silence it. A cold shower perhaps? You could be a dentist and extract a tooth from a person and feel vindictive pleasure in doing so though it is helping her. Doing good works does not prove you are a genuinely good person. It is so easy to convince yourself that there is no spite in your motive in removing the tooth especially when it helps her. The Bible warns about the self-deceiving powers of the human heart and in the gospels, Jesus couldn't break through the wall of self-righteousness the Pharisees had. They believed they were good though they were not.
THE SIN OF PARTIAL CONSENT
The Church of Rome alleges that when you sin you consent to it either
partly or fully. For a sin that tears
you away from God and makes you fit only for being dumped in Hell forever you
have to have full consent. If the
consent is incomplete then the sin is venial.
If a person is blinded by lust and falls into bed with somebody else’s
spouse that is a venial sin because the ignorance inflicted by the desire
forced the person to freely choose to sin.
The person forgot that adultery is a mortal sin and because of that he or
she could not commit a mortal sin by committing adultery.
All this seems fine, it seems reasonable.
And it seems to prove that venial sin does exist at least when there is
partial consent. But that is merely
because of our selfish prejudice and the lack of integrity that the Church
likes to have ingrained in us. We
sometimes like to pretend that our wrongdoing is not all our fault on the
grounds that we did not have a complete understanding of what we were
doing. We want to believe we sinned but
not very much.
But to sin you need to be aware that you are doing something that is
against God’s way. Therefore to say that
a person who cannot resist choosing to commit, say, adultery does not fully
know what she or he is doing and therefore not committing a mortal sin is
ludicrous for she or he knows all they need to know. If you know that much and can sin then you
have enough freedom regardless of the other motives caused by weakness or
whatever.
If you are overcome with passion and examine yourselves you will see that
your consent to sin was just as good as any other.
Perhaps the will is partly forced to commit adultery by the intense lust?
Stupid question.
Anybody who is weak is weak because they want to be. This means that weakness is no excuse for
half-excuse especially in the matter of the graver sins.
If the person freely consents to mortal sin then it is a mortal sin for
if it is not then the person had no free will at all. The person had enough freedom to sin. It is a contradiction to say that some part
of free will can be outside a person’s control.
So, the doctrine that mortal sin is impossible without perfect consent is
incoherent and childish because there is always sufficient assent. If a person can sin venially without full
control of the will then he or she can sin mortally too. Why is it that we never hear of a person
doing good works with imperfect consent?
If the Church really believed in partway consent she would remove the
things that make people do good though alleged weakness. She would have us dressed in long robes with
paper bags on our heads before letting us do good. And she claims she is here for making us the
best!
The doctrine that mortal sin is impossible without perfect consent is
covering over the gravity of mortal sin.
It is telling people that they are better than they truly are. It is treating their victims as nothing. Through the doctrine, many believers are able
to virtually condone many child-murders.
When they do that they are pronouncing their hatred on the little victims
and even for the killer though he or she is preferred at the same time.
It is vital for Catholics to examine their minds so carefully that they
will know if they granted full consent to any sin. The Church says she is concerned that they might
smear themselves by accusing themselves of mortal sin in confession so she
instructs them to be sure. But the only
thing they could be sure of is that they did consent fully. They must know that the official teaching
that partial consent proves venial sin exists is wrong for consent feels like
consent and you cannot be sure of the partial.
And we must realise that the doctrine accuses Christians who do not
believe in venial sin of fraud, of denying on religious grounds what they see
to exist by gazing into their own hearts because if you are not totally to
blame for your choice you would find out if you examine yourself. If Catholicism really believes in it then she
stoops low by treating those people as sincere dedicated followers of Christ.
It is often hard to be sure if you have consented fully to something or
not if the doctrine of the Catholic Church is correct. You need to go over every second to be
sure. Memory fails us and can be
contaminated. So what do you do? The mortal sinners would have to assume that
they are not mortal sinners to be on the safe side. Most of the damaging sins that happen are
caused by strong desire. But even weaker
desire could take away full use of the faculty of free will like when you are
rushing. The doctrine hints that most of
the people in jail should be out. The
doctrine is a menace. The Church even
lets people be jailed over it though it tells us she should not.
If you think you should assume that you are a mortal sinner the situation
is different but no better.
Now, it is common nowadays to insist that mortal sin is a rare occurrence
because people are so weak and sin is partly caused by desire. Religious teachers might tell you that the
more you want to commit what is seriously harmful the more venial it is if you
commit it. That means it is better to
kill a person who clearly intends to commit a mortal sin if it would be a
venial sin for you to murder. Then it
might not be a venial sin at all for it is averting a greater evil.
YOU WILL BE BLAMED FOR FORGOTTEN SINS
Many would argue that the idea of a God who punishes forgetful and
abstracted people like us for forgotten sin could not exist or could not be
considered fair. It is said that it is
not right to mete out retribution to a person who does not remember the
crime. If that is correct then it is
wrong to punish a person who has not forgotten the crime but who is distracted
from it. It is wrong to punish a person
who forgets how free they were. Nobody
remembers how free they were for most sins.
This idea that God will not punish forgotten sins cannot be proved. It is just to punish one for a forgotten
crime. The person deserves it whether
she or he has forgotten or not. And they
would have forgotten if they didn’t want to.
They wanted to forget the sins even if they were too lazy to write them
down. If the person knows she or he is
being punished for something that is what counts. If it is unfair to punish one for a forgotten
crime then it is unfair to return a kindness to a person who cannot even think
of what it is for on account of being racked with pain. It would be unfair to reward a person for a
long forgotten kindness that only you remember.
It would be unfair to let a person who has been sent to jail be unaware
of their crime. If a person takes
amnesia and wanders off into the night the people who raid the house would not
be stealing for it would not be his if he has forgotten them. Punishment is for making the person suffer
for the crime, which can be done regardless of whether or not the person
remembers.
We all know we forget many so-called sins. But we keep making more sins we do not
forget. When you sin you reverse
repentance for previous sins and become as bad as you were before you
repented. You are reiterating the
malignance and pride in your sins. So
when you sin, you wish that all of the sins you have forgotten no matter how
numerous they were will be restored as insults to God.
The doctrine of original sin says that babies are punished for this sin
by not having God’s presence in them.
That proves God must hold forgotten sin against you and you never know
if you are right with him or not.
The suffering of babies would not disprove the idea that suffering is
punishment for sin unless one assumes that reincarnation is impossible.
If forgotten sins should be pardoned then we should pardon unrepentant
sins for they are no different.
A SINNER CAN’T DO GOOD
James observed that the person who breaks one of the divine Laws breaks
all of them (2:10). A sinner cannot then
do real good. He also said that a fig
tree cannot bear olive berries and that a fountain cannot give good water and
bad (3:10,12). He means that sin defiles
all you do even the good.
Paul said that he was sold to sin (Romans
Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that we being evil still know how
to do good. Does this deny that we are
naturally only evil for it was spoken to people who were not Christians or
saved and who were evil? But every sin
is good in a sense. It is a warped sense
of the good. When you rebel it is
because you want something good. The
Jews would have known that Jesus did not mean righteous good for their own
scriptures and reason said that a person who harbours a sin cannot please God
no matter how much good he does (Isaiah 64:6; Psalm 39:5; Job 14:4). If I help a sick person and in my heart I
will the act not to please God I am doing good but not in my heart.
You can do good holding an evil attitude in your heart so it is not real
good then. If you are nice to people
just because you want to be nice to them and cannot be nice to yourself then
your act is evil. Nobody can stand the person who pretends that good is evil or
that evil is good. Their viciousness and
promotion of badness while their hands are placed together in prayer and their
faces benign just make people feel more contempt towards them.
Not long after I made my first confession, I made the first major
religious discovery of my life. Seated
in the Church waiting for another humiliating confession, I realised that all
my virtues were really vices and hypocrisies though
Like Catholicism, the Bible and many religions say we are all
sinners. The Christian believes that
because of original sin we are pulled into sin and nobody is sinless. Romans 3 makes this clear. So does reason for we can all think of things
we could do to improve the world and don’t do them.
The Catholic Church tells us that we can stay out of sin but only for a
moment. If I cleanse myself of all sin
and then do a good work there is sin in the fact that I don’t want to do a
better good.
And she says that if we fall into sin and won’t come out we can still do
real good provided the sin is venial except in appearance. Venial sin does not end your relationship
with God while the other, mortal, does.
The Church says that the mortal sinner cannot do real good because he or
she has renounced God.
So according to the pope and his minions you can please God while being
in a state of venial sin or when you are not sorry for it. Every Catholic knows by experience what is
wrong with this. We all see people who
do good to a person while not being sorry for hurting that person as bluffers
and toadies.
One sin prevents you from doing sincere good. To refuse to be penitent for your sins is a
new sin. Every moment you abide in
unrepentance is a fresh sin - the sin of
unrepentance. When you do good and
refuse to cast off your sins you are impudently letting God know that you do
good when it suits you and not him. The
good is done to gratify arrogance and self-centredness so it is really
counterfeit good. It may have good
results but it is not good for it is done with an impure motive. It is offence for it can’t have a good
motive. This religion advocates
artificial holiness.
When you do good instead of repenting first you are using that good as an
excuse not to purify yourself so then how could it be genuine good? It is inauthentic. It is harder to see your evil if you do
that. Such sin is worse than the original
sin. Jesus explicitly taught that the
good-living respectable and charming Pharisees were far worse than tax collectors
and prostitutes. That was why.
If you maintain your sinfulness you cannot love anybody else. Sin is opposition to God’s goodness and to
oppose that is to oppose what is good for others so any love you think you have
for them is a pretence or self-delusion.
It is also insulting them for if you hurt X then you would have hurt
your friend Y if he had been X.
Some say the following. Since we
can’t stop sinning our good works and kind deeds are sinful. God just has to reward these “good” sins in
order to supply us with praise and grace to stop us from getting worse.” The argument is unsound for God does not have
to call evil good to do that. He should
take us to Heaven when we are no good down here instead.
Sin is an offence. To be impenitent
for it is to double the insult. To be
unrepentant for this is to double both insults and it keeps doubling every
moment. So when you persist in
unrepentance you are accumulating more and more guilt. I mean sinful responsibility and not the
emotion when emotion that conflicts with good logic and forces you astray is
diagnosed as a disorder we must be extremely sick and unreliable when we don’t
worry about our sins like we would about death and other things.
To offer dog dirt to God would be a mortal sin in the eyes of the
Church. So it is a mortal sin for a
venial sinner to attempt to consecrate a good deed performed while one is in
venial sin to God. It is like offering
dog dirt. And if the sinner does not do
good it would only be a venial sin unless the commission does tremendous
harm. Offering dog dirt wouldn’t be as
bad as offering sin to God. Dirt is only
a thing but sin is disrespect.
The doctrine that we all sin and can still please God forbids much
goodness.
If all are sinners then it is a sin to thank a person for that is
thanking him for sinning. It is a sin to thank others for helping you for that
help though not sinful in itself was given by a sinful motive.
If all are sinners then it is a sin to do good for you should be
lecturing sinners on repentance all the time for anything else is the sin of
distracting them from awareness of their sins.
If you are sinners yourselves you have to include yourselves. Yes people will look at you and get sick of
you but God said he comes first and that we are never to advance the cause of
sin. And to do anything that leads to a
person staying in sin for even one minute extra is a sin – if priests were
really holy they would stay in the confessional day and night so that sinners
could get absolved as fast as possible.
When sinning Catholics praise God for the good he allegedly helped them
to do they are praising Satan because they mean to give thanks to a being who
is so cruel that he punishes people for sin while regarding it as being of no
consequence! Their prayers and
self-satisfaction are making dirt of the people they have hurt. The papacy wants to create a race of
Pharisees like those Jesus had to put up with.
When a person in the habit of sin asks God for grace to do better that
person is insulting him unless he is asking for the grace of repentance. And asking for the grace of repentance would
be a sin for you already have that grace for God offers it to everybody for he
wants all to be saved. So all the person
can do is imply consent to God’s forgiveness instead of asking for grace. Only after the repentance has been completed
can he ask for grace. But the repentance
doesn’t do much good for a new sin happens as soon as it is got. When the venial or mortal sinner praises
God’s love that person is being sarcastic.
They are telling God that he is good but not good enough for them for
they prefer sin.
You cannot forgive unless you judge as well. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that it
is a sin to judge if you are as bad or worse yourself. It is hypocrisy to pardon a person when you
have a sin yourself even if you are not as bad as that person. I forgive you but I won’t forgive my own by
pardoning it and getting it pardoned so the smaller the sin I have the worse
the insult. It is hypocrisy to approve
of a person repenting when you won’t repent yourself for that is saying, “I am
glad you took the inconvenience of repenting but rather you than me!” You cannot care about the person with an attitude
like that! And if your sin is as bad or
worse this is terrible. And if your sin
is smaller it is still terrible. You
agree with the person suffering to abandon such and such a big sin and you
still keep your “teeny” one.
Incidentally, all this proves that if Jesus gave priests the power to
forgive sin it cannot work.
Hypocritical Catholics hate the religionists they oppose for when they
are hypocrites themselves what right have they opposing them? Catholics who know the facts about sin making
your good evil and who support their religion are responsible for every drop of
blood spilt over their religion for they are building up the fraud that leads
to it. They hate and or disrespect the
people who have died over their religion.
They have brains so they cannot vaunt their “sincerity” as their
exoneration.
The saints of
The Catholic Church is fond of its martyrs like St Thomas More and St
Blaise. These men gave their lives for
Satan and were filled with rapture for his unholy spirit despite their good
image. They weren’t right in the head.
Protestantism as preached by Luther might be a disgrace but at least it
does not pretend that real goodness and love of sin can be had at the same
time. In that system, God pretends you
are holy like Jesus who has been holy for you in your place so that he can let
you into Heaven forever.
The religions all say that we all fail in some way to do what is right
and that none of us are perfect. No
matter how much good we do we would do more by moving away to a place where
there is trouble and where we can be of help.
The Buddhist holds that if he were perfect he would be dead and in
Nirvana.
Most religions encourage evil dressed up as good as does the Catholic
Church.
How can any sin be venial when it denigrates forgiveness and closes the
heart to real mercy and results in so much degradation? If a person stole ten pence a day from his
mother and both lived long enough for it to amount to a million pounds they say
that person is a mortal sinner who just broke the sin up into bits but still
intended to all that harm.
The doctrine of sin makes hypocrites and would kill us all by despair or
through the hands of people who can’t stand us.
It is a bad doctrine.
When we sin most of the time - if not all of it - it follows that when
you believe in God your trespasses are worse than they would be if you did not
for then you are intending to hurt God as well as other people and yourself. When if there was no God or if you didn’t
believe in him you would not be meaning to hurt him. There would be less evil intended. Christians
cannot use the objection: “Belief in God increasing the malice of wrongdoing is
not a bad thing as long as we remember that the good we do would be more good
because we believe in God and intend it to be acts of love for him as well as
others so the increase of sin is made up for by the increase of goodness.” They cannot use it for it presupposes that we
are more good than bad.
God is a bad doctrine for it implies that we sin most if not all of the
time. He has put us in a world full of
temptation and godless influence instead of making us think we are in a world
that is full of good influences, a virtual reality world. This implies that we are too bad to be
influenced which is why we are on this world.
CONCLUSION
The Christian consensus which denies that the only good work a sinner can
do is repent is sheer deceit. We all
know its deceit for we don’t praise the good works of a son who helps his
mother but who just wants her money.
WORKS CONSULTED
FRIDAY PENANCE, John C Edwards SJ,
Catholic Truth Society,
CITY OF
EVERYMAN’S ROAD
TO HEAVEN, Leo J Trese, Geoffrey Chapman,
APOLOGETICS AND CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Most Rev M Sheehan DD, M H Gill &
Son,
RADIO REPLIES, VOL 1, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press,
THE SINNER’S GUIDE, Ven Louis of
CHRISTIANITY, David Albert Jones OP, Family Publications,
THE INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, John Calvin, Hodder and
BIBLE VERSION USED
The Amplified Bible
Friday, 26 October
2007
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