Some Thoughts on Wrongdoing, Forgiveness, and Christianity
Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2026 5:01 pm
Some Thoughts on Wrongdoing, Forgiveness, and Christianity
This is an attempt to articulate some half-baked thoughts on different kinds of wrongdoing, and on forgiving or not forgiving them, and on religious attitudes towards those things, that have been moving back and forth inside my head recently. Towards the end, things will get pretty weird, and might make both atheists and conventional followers of major religions shake their heads and roll their eyes at me.
I've had various kinds of opinions on Christianity and its various aspects, forms, and subdivisions over the years. But for much of that time, one constant was that I thought that, no matter what you might think about the rest of Christianity, one clearly good aspect of it is its teaching that all people (except Mary mother of Jesus) are sinners. That, I thought, puts us all on an equal footing, reminds us not to become to full of ourselves, reminds the mighty and important that they're still sinners, too, and reminds us that, while we shouldn't have too high an opinion of ourselves, we shouldn't be too down on ourselves, either, because, after all, everyone else is a sinner, too.
And, well, I no longer think that.
I now think that treating all people as, in many ways, equally sinful makes it way too difficult, or even impossible, for those people who are mostly OK and not that bad to assert themselves against the cruelest and most unjust people in the world, that is, those who often or always try their best to harm and hurt the rest of us. And that is especially dangerous when people like that become very powerful.
I now think that stressing everyone's sinfulness makes many people obsessed with feelings of guilt and shame, which, among other things, makes it a lot easier for the powerful, especially the very cruel and unjust among the powerful, to keep the rest of us docile and submissive.
The central issue here, as I see it, is that sin does not equal sin. Or, in less religiously loaded terminology, wrongdoing does not equal wrongdoing. Getting into a heated argument with your neighbor or flatmate although you should have known that you were mostly or entirely in the wrong is simply not the same as cold-blooded murder.
Equating everyone's fallenness on the grounds that we are fundamentally all sinners makes it oh-so-easy for the defenders of powerful oppressors to tell the people they oppress that, because of their own sinfulness, they have no standing to criticize. This is, of course, made especially easy by the insistence of conservative forms of various religions that all kinds of perfectly fine and very common sexual desires and actions are sinful:
"Yes, the local squire assaulted and almost murdered you last week because you didn't jump out of his way quickly enough when the two of you met in the street. But you yourself have very often had lustful thoughts in your life, and have often even acted on them, so you shouldn't condemn others for their sins!"
But even without ridiculous traditional hangups about sex, equating all acts of wrongdoing can easily be used to trivialize major injustices:
"Yes, your boss threatened to fire you if you won't go along with pumping even more toxic waste into the river and lying about it at the press conference. But you once screamed really hurtful things at your older brother when you got angry at him, so who are you to judge?"
The problems with this approach aren't always limited to a specific religion, or even to religion in general, though. Being so focused on one's own failings that one is plagued by extreme self-doubt can afflict people with all kinds of positions on the question of religion. Among pious believers, committed atheists, and any kind of people in between, you can sometimes see well-meaning, thoughtful people who have an honest desire to focus on the logs in their own eyes, but might go a bit too far with that, engaging in hand-wringing along the lines of
"I was once very rude to a stranger who had annoyed me, so can I really claim to be a better person than King Leopold?"
Yes. You can. If you're not a mass murderer yourself, you can, and should, criticize and oppose and fight against mass murderers. If you're not any kind of murderer yourself, you can, and should, criticize and oppose and fight against murderers. You are not contradicting yourself or being hypocritical if you do that.
This might be related to a more secular phenomenon: the habit among many people of demanding that other people, usually those whom they don't like, should have the same attitude towards everyone, and that they're doing something wrong when they don't.
The main example of this that I am thinking of right now is the habit of many right-wingers to demand that left-wingers should always be nice to them, and are supposedly going against their own stated values when they aren't. Whenever left-wingers get the slightest bit assertive in their dealings with right-wingers, right-wingers might react by saying things like
"So much for the tolerant Left!" or
"Aren't you supposed to be the side of peace, love, and understanding?"
The underlying "logic", if you want to call it that, is that people supposedly have an obligation to have the same attitude towards everyone, so if you say that you value tolerance, peace, love, and understanding, you have an obligation to be either unconditionally tolerant, peaceful, loving, and understanding towards everyone, or to stop talking about tolerance, peace, love, and understanding.
And that's just not true, as far as I'm concerned. There simply isn't anything wrong with treating different people differently based on how they themselves treat other people, and their own attitudes towards other people. There's nothing contradictory, inconsistent, or hypocritical about being tolerant towards the tolerant and intolerant towards the intolerant, or about being peaceful towards the peaceful and confrontational and determined towards the aggressive.
A fictional version of this kind of thing are scenes in some works of fiction where a villainous character tells a protagonist something like
"If you kill me, or seriously hurt me, you'll become just like me, and you don't want that, right?"
Again, the problem is the idea that the same kinds of actions are always equally good or bad, equally right or wrong, no matter the context. I don't accept that idea, and neither should you.
Interwoven with the matter of different kinds of sin, or different kinds of wrongdoing, is the matter of forgiveness for such things. In that context, making people believe that all our wrong actions are the same is, once again, a way to help and enable those people who do the worst kind kinds of things.
A standard view of sin and forgiveness is the idea that, because we are all sinners, we all urgently need forgiveness, and we should therefore, ourselves, always be unconditionally forgiving towards others. In Christianity, this idea is built right into the Lord's Prayer. The idea seems to imply that, if you aren't willing to forgive Timur/Tamerlane for his sins, you can not reasonably expect other people, or God, to forgive you for your sins.
But this is, at least indirectly, based on the idea that since we are all sinners, our needs for forgiveness are all more or less equal. To which I respond, once again, that sin does not equal sin. Wrongdoing does not equal wrongdoing. And forgiveness for massacres is not the same as forgiveness for being a bit inconsiderate.
I have written before that I think what to make of forgiveness depends on context. When it comes to the many small instances of wrongdoing that we all commit against each other over the course of our lives – yes, in that context forgiveness is very important. Without forgiveness for our many small acts of wrongdoing, life would be even more insufferable than it already is. That kind of forgiveness is an important part of keeping us off each others’ throats.
But forgiveness for really large acts of wrongdoing is a different matter. It can sometimes be an important part of the psychological healing process for survivors of cruel and brutal acts, as well as for people who were close to those who did not survive such acts. And people who offer it out of their own conviction should be respected for that. But I don’t think it should ever be presented as an obligation.
And I don't think that the need for forgiveness is the same for an ordinary person with an ordinary record of wrong or not-quite-right actions as for a perpetrator of major injustices. So authorities, religious or secular, should not act as if, when they're willing to forgive an everyday sinner one of their everyday sins, that is some kind of act of outstanding generosity for which they are owed a lot of gratitude.
However, since this post deals partly with religion and the religious aspects of wrongdoing and forgiveness, the question remains: if there is a God, what about forgiveness granted, or not granted, by God? Well, this is the point where this post gets to the weirdness that I promised at the start. Because I want to use this question as a prompt to speculate a bit about what it would mean if there would be a God who is actually just.
That idea does, of course, sound very ridiculous to many people. The world we currently live in? With all that is happening in it? Ruled over by a just God? How could that possibly be the case? But if we're talking about the possibility of a God, we might as well be talking about the possibility of an afterlife. And if we do that, we might as well assume that, while there is little justice in this world, a just God might well put things right in such an afterlife.
Hey, I told you this post would get weird.
Now, the world's various monotheistic religions usually claim that the God whom they worship is just. But often, the way they describe their God's actions, words, and wishes makes their God look anything but just to a person with a strong natural instinct for justice.
For instance, the more traditionalist versions of Christianity usually claim that your afterlife depends entirely on whether you were a follower of the right kind of Christianity during your lifetime. If you were, you are guaranteed, or at least almost guaranteed, a place in Heaven. If you weren't, you are guaranteed a place in Hell. How to be a proper follower of the right version of Christianity depends on what that version is. For instance, Evangelical Protestants claim that the important thing is to personally accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Traditionalist Catholics seem to claim that the important thing is to take part in the Sacraments of, and be in Communion with, the Catholic Church. In either case, following the requirements will lead to your sins being forgiven, no matter how bad those sins were, and guarantee you a place in Heaven.
Of course, these ideas about how to gain Salvation are a classic example of a naked emperor. They are only taken seriously because so many supposedly important people say that they should be taken seriously. The claim that all your sins and wrongdoings, no matter how harmful or hurtful, are guaranteed to be forgiven as long as you say the right magic words about Jesus is a transparent cheap salesman's trick to make you join certain preachers' churches. It doesn't deserve more respect or consideration than a claim that some new vitamin shake which someone is trying to sell you can cure every illness in the world would deserve.
Then again, the very people who are most likely to believe that saying the right magic words about Jesus will guarantee your Salvation often seem to be the kind of people who are most likely to believe that some new vitamin shake really will cure all your illnesses, too. It may or may not be possible to cure gullibility.
In any case, it is clear that a just God - and remember that denominations of monotheistic religions usually claim that God is just - wouldn't tell a dead mass murderer "Congratulations, you said the right magic words about Jesus, so welcome to Heaven", and then, afterwards, tell a dead person whose biggest sins were about getting into heated family arguments "Sorry, you didn't say the right magic words about Jesus, so off to Hell you go". Perhaps there is a God who will say these things, but that would not be a just God.
Besides, the idea that your afterlife depends entirely on your religion or lack thereof basically demolishes one of the most popular arguments for why people should supposedly believe in God. Religious conservatives love to argue that belief in God is necessary for people to act morally, because only fear of Divine punishment and hope for Divine rewards will motivate people to do the right thing. Many of the same religious conservatives also love to argue that how morally or immorally you acted in your life is completely irrelevant in the afterlife, because what happens there depends entirely on whether you followed the right version of the right religion before you died. Of course, if the second claim would really be true, the first one would fall apart.
An actual just God, however, would not care about which religion, if any, you followed in your life, or about whether you followed pointless traditionalist restrictions on your sex life. And a God like that would not think that the usual collection of everyday wrongdoings during an ordinary life would condemn you to Hell in a way that would require some kind of Salvation, either. Such a God would care mainly about how you treated other people during your life. And if that God would be all-knowing, there would be no way of bullshitting that God. None of the lies, falsehoods, half-truths, evasions, rationalisations, or methods of distraction that you used to justify what you did to yourself and your friends would work.
Perhaps a just God would still forgive people who committed really cruel and unjust acts if they seriously tried to make amends for them out of honest, heartfelt remorse. Or perhaps not. Perhaps all too many people would end up being told, "Sorry, the only way for you to gain Salvation would have been to not have done the things you did in the first place."
Another trait of a just God would be that such a God would never reliably be on anyone's side. Not even on your side, no matter which one that might be. After all, everyone sometimes does unjust things, and a just God would not support unjust things. So a just God would not support anyone all the time. The rule would not be, "No matter what you do, it is automatically just, because God is on your side". No, it would be, "Whenever what you do is unjust, God is, at least at that moment, not on your side".
Traditionalist followers of various religions might scoff and sneer at all this. They might say that what I just wrote is all just some silly invention. But can they really be sure about that? Can they really know, can they really prove, with complete and absolute certainty, that the just God described here doesn't exist? Can they really, completely and reliably, without any doubt, dismiss the idea that the just God of this post, instead of their religion's idea of God, will wait for them when they die? (Yes, I admit it, I'm trolling a bit here.) Because if that just God is waiting for them, some of them might be in real trouble.
What is the point of this whole exercise? Mostly to try to strengthen the confidence of reasonably well-meaning and generally OK people in their dealings with the worst people in the world. Instead of constantly telling ourselves and each other, "Yes, they have done and keep doing very cruel things, but we are all sinners ourselves, so we shouldn't cast stones", we should be assertive about criticizing, confronting, and, yes, condemning them.
Arguably, what the world needs is a kind of muscular do-gooderism. That idea would sound like an oxymoron to many people. But there isn't really a contradiction between wanting to do good and useful and helpful things, and wanting to be assertive about confronting those who want to do the opposite kind of things.
Let's do that.
This is an attempt to articulate some half-baked thoughts on different kinds of wrongdoing, and on forgiving or not forgiving them, and on religious attitudes towards those things, that have been moving back and forth inside my head recently. Towards the end, things will get pretty weird, and might make both atheists and conventional followers of major religions shake their heads and roll their eyes at me.
I've had various kinds of opinions on Christianity and its various aspects, forms, and subdivisions over the years. But for much of that time, one constant was that I thought that, no matter what you might think about the rest of Christianity, one clearly good aspect of it is its teaching that all people (except Mary mother of Jesus) are sinners. That, I thought, puts us all on an equal footing, reminds us not to become to full of ourselves, reminds the mighty and important that they're still sinners, too, and reminds us that, while we shouldn't have too high an opinion of ourselves, we shouldn't be too down on ourselves, either, because, after all, everyone else is a sinner, too.
And, well, I no longer think that.
I now think that treating all people as, in many ways, equally sinful makes it way too difficult, or even impossible, for those people who are mostly OK and not that bad to assert themselves against the cruelest and most unjust people in the world, that is, those who often or always try their best to harm and hurt the rest of us. And that is especially dangerous when people like that become very powerful.
I now think that stressing everyone's sinfulness makes many people obsessed with feelings of guilt and shame, which, among other things, makes it a lot easier for the powerful, especially the very cruel and unjust among the powerful, to keep the rest of us docile and submissive.
The central issue here, as I see it, is that sin does not equal sin. Or, in less religiously loaded terminology, wrongdoing does not equal wrongdoing. Getting into a heated argument with your neighbor or flatmate although you should have known that you were mostly or entirely in the wrong is simply not the same as cold-blooded murder.
Equating everyone's fallenness on the grounds that we are fundamentally all sinners makes it oh-so-easy for the defenders of powerful oppressors to tell the people they oppress that, because of their own sinfulness, they have no standing to criticize. This is, of course, made especially easy by the insistence of conservative forms of various religions that all kinds of perfectly fine and very common sexual desires and actions are sinful:
"Yes, the local squire assaulted and almost murdered you last week because you didn't jump out of his way quickly enough when the two of you met in the street. But you yourself have very often had lustful thoughts in your life, and have often even acted on them, so you shouldn't condemn others for their sins!"
But even without ridiculous traditional hangups about sex, equating all acts of wrongdoing can easily be used to trivialize major injustices:
"Yes, your boss threatened to fire you if you won't go along with pumping even more toxic waste into the river and lying about it at the press conference. But you once screamed really hurtful things at your older brother when you got angry at him, so who are you to judge?"
The problems with this approach aren't always limited to a specific religion, or even to religion in general, though. Being so focused on one's own failings that one is plagued by extreme self-doubt can afflict people with all kinds of positions on the question of religion. Among pious believers, committed atheists, and any kind of people in between, you can sometimes see well-meaning, thoughtful people who have an honest desire to focus on the logs in their own eyes, but might go a bit too far with that, engaging in hand-wringing along the lines of
"I was once very rude to a stranger who had annoyed me, so can I really claim to be a better person than King Leopold?"
Yes. You can. If you're not a mass murderer yourself, you can, and should, criticize and oppose and fight against mass murderers. If you're not any kind of murderer yourself, you can, and should, criticize and oppose and fight against murderers. You are not contradicting yourself or being hypocritical if you do that.
This might be related to a more secular phenomenon: the habit among many people of demanding that other people, usually those whom they don't like, should have the same attitude towards everyone, and that they're doing something wrong when they don't.
The main example of this that I am thinking of right now is the habit of many right-wingers to demand that left-wingers should always be nice to them, and are supposedly going against their own stated values when they aren't. Whenever left-wingers get the slightest bit assertive in their dealings with right-wingers, right-wingers might react by saying things like
"So much for the tolerant Left!" or
"Aren't you supposed to be the side of peace, love, and understanding?"
The underlying "logic", if you want to call it that, is that people supposedly have an obligation to have the same attitude towards everyone, so if you say that you value tolerance, peace, love, and understanding, you have an obligation to be either unconditionally tolerant, peaceful, loving, and understanding towards everyone, or to stop talking about tolerance, peace, love, and understanding.
And that's just not true, as far as I'm concerned. There simply isn't anything wrong with treating different people differently based on how they themselves treat other people, and their own attitudes towards other people. There's nothing contradictory, inconsistent, or hypocritical about being tolerant towards the tolerant and intolerant towards the intolerant, or about being peaceful towards the peaceful and confrontational and determined towards the aggressive.
A fictional version of this kind of thing are scenes in some works of fiction where a villainous character tells a protagonist something like
"If you kill me, or seriously hurt me, you'll become just like me, and you don't want that, right?"
Again, the problem is the idea that the same kinds of actions are always equally good or bad, equally right or wrong, no matter the context. I don't accept that idea, and neither should you.
Interwoven with the matter of different kinds of sin, or different kinds of wrongdoing, is the matter of forgiveness for such things. In that context, making people believe that all our wrong actions are the same is, once again, a way to help and enable those people who do the worst kind kinds of things.
A standard view of sin and forgiveness is the idea that, because we are all sinners, we all urgently need forgiveness, and we should therefore, ourselves, always be unconditionally forgiving towards others. In Christianity, this idea is built right into the Lord's Prayer. The idea seems to imply that, if you aren't willing to forgive Timur/Tamerlane for his sins, you can not reasonably expect other people, or God, to forgive you for your sins.
But this is, at least indirectly, based on the idea that since we are all sinners, our needs for forgiveness are all more or less equal. To which I respond, once again, that sin does not equal sin. Wrongdoing does not equal wrongdoing. And forgiveness for massacres is not the same as forgiveness for being a bit inconsiderate.
I have written before that I think what to make of forgiveness depends on context. When it comes to the many small instances of wrongdoing that we all commit against each other over the course of our lives – yes, in that context forgiveness is very important. Without forgiveness for our many small acts of wrongdoing, life would be even more insufferable than it already is. That kind of forgiveness is an important part of keeping us off each others’ throats.
But forgiveness for really large acts of wrongdoing is a different matter. It can sometimes be an important part of the psychological healing process for survivors of cruel and brutal acts, as well as for people who were close to those who did not survive such acts. And people who offer it out of their own conviction should be respected for that. But I don’t think it should ever be presented as an obligation.
And I don't think that the need for forgiveness is the same for an ordinary person with an ordinary record of wrong or not-quite-right actions as for a perpetrator of major injustices. So authorities, religious or secular, should not act as if, when they're willing to forgive an everyday sinner one of their everyday sins, that is some kind of act of outstanding generosity for which they are owed a lot of gratitude.
However, since this post deals partly with religion and the religious aspects of wrongdoing and forgiveness, the question remains: if there is a God, what about forgiveness granted, or not granted, by God? Well, this is the point where this post gets to the weirdness that I promised at the start. Because I want to use this question as a prompt to speculate a bit about what it would mean if there would be a God who is actually just.
That idea does, of course, sound very ridiculous to many people. The world we currently live in? With all that is happening in it? Ruled over by a just God? How could that possibly be the case? But if we're talking about the possibility of a God, we might as well be talking about the possibility of an afterlife. And if we do that, we might as well assume that, while there is little justice in this world, a just God might well put things right in such an afterlife.
Hey, I told you this post would get weird.
Now, the world's various monotheistic religions usually claim that the God whom they worship is just. But often, the way they describe their God's actions, words, and wishes makes their God look anything but just to a person with a strong natural instinct for justice.
For instance, the more traditionalist versions of Christianity usually claim that your afterlife depends entirely on whether you were a follower of the right kind of Christianity during your lifetime. If you were, you are guaranteed, or at least almost guaranteed, a place in Heaven. If you weren't, you are guaranteed a place in Hell. How to be a proper follower of the right version of Christianity depends on what that version is. For instance, Evangelical Protestants claim that the important thing is to personally accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Traditionalist Catholics seem to claim that the important thing is to take part in the Sacraments of, and be in Communion with, the Catholic Church. In either case, following the requirements will lead to your sins being forgiven, no matter how bad those sins were, and guarantee you a place in Heaven.
Of course, these ideas about how to gain Salvation are a classic example of a naked emperor. They are only taken seriously because so many supposedly important people say that they should be taken seriously. The claim that all your sins and wrongdoings, no matter how harmful or hurtful, are guaranteed to be forgiven as long as you say the right magic words about Jesus is a transparent cheap salesman's trick to make you join certain preachers' churches. It doesn't deserve more respect or consideration than a claim that some new vitamin shake which someone is trying to sell you can cure every illness in the world would deserve.
Then again, the very people who are most likely to believe that saying the right magic words about Jesus will guarantee your Salvation often seem to be the kind of people who are most likely to believe that some new vitamin shake really will cure all your illnesses, too. It may or may not be possible to cure gullibility.
In any case, it is clear that a just God - and remember that denominations of monotheistic religions usually claim that God is just - wouldn't tell a dead mass murderer "Congratulations, you said the right magic words about Jesus, so welcome to Heaven", and then, afterwards, tell a dead person whose biggest sins were about getting into heated family arguments "Sorry, you didn't say the right magic words about Jesus, so off to Hell you go". Perhaps there is a God who will say these things, but that would not be a just God.
Besides, the idea that your afterlife depends entirely on your religion or lack thereof basically demolishes one of the most popular arguments for why people should supposedly believe in God. Religious conservatives love to argue that belief in God is necessary for people to act morally, because only fear of Divine punishment and hope for Divine rewards will motivate people to do the right thing. Many of the same religious conservatives also love to argue that how morally or immorally you acted in your life is completely irrelevant in the afterlife, because what happens there depends entirely on whether you followed the right version of the right religion before you died. Of course, if the second claim would really be true, the first one would fall apart.
An actual just God, however, would not care about which religion, if any, you followed in your life, or about whether you followed pointless traditionalist restrictions on your sex life. And a God like that would not think that the usual collection of everyday wrongdoings during an ordinary life would condemn you to Hell in a way that would require some kind of Salvation, either. Such a God would care mainly about how you treated other people during your life. And if that God would be all-knowing, there would be no way of bullshitting that God. None of the lies, falsehoods, half-truths, evasions, rationalisations, or methods of distraction that you used to justify what you did to yourself and your friends would work.
Perhaps a just God would still forgive people who committed really cruel and unjust acts if they seriously tried to make amends for them out of honest, heartfelt remorse. Or perhaps not. Perhaps all too many people would end up being told, "Sorry, the only way for you to gain Salvation would have been to not have done the things you did in the first place."
Another trait of a just God would be that such a God would never reliably be on anyone's side. Not even on your side, no matter which one that might be. After all, everyone sometimes does unjust things, and a just God would not support unjust things. So a just God would not support anyone all the time. The rule would not be, "No matter what you do, it is automatically just, because God is on your side". No, it would be, "Whenever what you do is unjust, God is, at least at that moment, not on your side".
Traditionalist followers of various religions might scoff and sneer at all this. They might say that what I just wrote is all just some silly invention. But can they really be sure about that? Can they really know, can they really prove, with complete and absolute certainty, that the just God described here doesn't exist? Can they really, completely and reliably, without any doubt, dismiss the idea that the just God of this post, instead of their religion's idea of God, will wait for them when they die? (Yes, I admit it, I'm trolling a bit here.) Because if that just God is waiting for them, some of them might be in real trouble.
What is the point of this whole exercise? Mostly to try to strengthen the confidence of reasonably well-meaning and generally OK people in their dealings with the worst people in the world. Instead of constantly telling ourselves and each other, "Yes, they have done and keep doing very cruel things, but we are all sinners ourselves, so we shouldn't cast stones", we should be assertive about criticizing, confronting, and, yes, condemning them.
Arguably, what the world needs is a kind of muscular do-gooderism. That idea would sound like an oxymoron to many people. But there isn't really a contradiction between wanting to do good and useful and helpful things, and wanting to be assertive about confronting those who want to do the opposite kind of things.
Let's do that.
con-fesse (cunt, buttcheek)