Our Common Dharma: Sin isn’t what you think it is

I was taught, as many people raised in or around Christianity were, that sin separates us from God. I have a problem with that.

If God exists, I don’t think separation is possible.

I see no boundary where God ends and everything else begins. I can’t think of God as a supernatural being occupying some corner of the universe over there and the rest of us over here, but rather as the sacred depth of all reality itself: the mystery, creativity and love within which everything exists. The “All That Is.”

You’ll eventually notice that I refer to God as It, with a capital I. God has no gender, yet masculine pronouns reinforce patriarchal assumptions that clearly aren’t doing us any favors. So I choose to ungender the divine, even at the risk of sounding disrespectful. But I at least capitalize It.

Back to the point, though, if there is nowhere God is not, how could I become separated from It? I can be cruel, damage relationships, and ignore suffering. But I can’t climb outside of God.

Whenever I look at sin in the Bible, I see the same underlying concern: something that prevents or destroys right relationship with four things — other people, ourselves, the Earth or God. Even ancient rules about purity, obedience and covenant were understood within their cultures as ways of maintaining those relationships.

You don’t have to believe in God to recognize this. An atheist understands compassion, morality and love without calling them divine. And given how God has often been described, who could blame anyone for not believing?

If God demanded unquestioning obedience, condemned people for whom they love, punished honest doubt, and threatened eternal torture for believing incorrectly, I wouldn’t believe in that God either. And I don’t.

We needn’t agree about God to recognize what happens when human beings hurt one another. Consider what scripture condemns: lying, greed, exploitation, cruelty, murder, oppression and neglect of the vulnerable.

What do these have in common? They prevent or destroy relationship. Sin isn’t really about breaking a rule. It’s about breaking something between us.

Which changes how we might understand hell.

For centuries, people have been told that certain beliefs or behaviors separate them from God forever. Hell becomes the ultimate punishment, which religious authorities claim to know how to avoid. That’s why you’re made to think you need them.

“Believe what I tell you. Behave as I tell you. Repent as I tell you. Maybe God will forgive you.” That is an awful lot of power to place in human hands.

But what if nobody gets to decide who is separated from God because nobody actually is?

What if hell isn’t somewhere God casts us, but a condition we create when we withdraw compassion from one another?

We create hell through hatred, violence, exploitation and indifference. Societies create hell through poverty, racism, war and oppression. Industry creates hell on Earth by finding new ways to destroy it.

Those who suffer most often didn’t create it. Sin’s consequences are real, but way unfairly distributed.

This Biblical weapon really gets to me: “The wages of sin is death.” It’s used to shame people into obedience. Has that even worked? Have you noticed any widespread obedience?

What if “the wages of sin” describes a consequence rather than a punishment?

Lies kill trust. Greed kills generosity. Violence kills safety. Exploitation kills dignity. Hatred kills our ability to recognize one another’s humanity.

The wages of sin are like death because separation destroys the conditions in which life flourishes.

God doesn’t need to do a damn thing. We do it all by ourselves.

But when we practice honesty, compassion, generosity and justice? We know what flourishes in their presence.

Even Adam and Eve’s story becomes interesting through this lens. After they eat the forbidden fruit, God doesn’t disappear. God goes looking for them. They’re the ones hiding.

Then come shame, blame, accusation and alienation. The man blames the woman. The woman blames the serpent. Relationships start falling apart right away.

The story isn’t about God abandoning humanity, for God clearly didn’t. It’s about humanity hiding and turning against one another.

This raises an inconvenient truth for Christianity: using the concept of sin to dominate another person is itself sinful. If sin diminishes dignity and damages relationships, weaponizing the word accomplishes precisely what sin does. The threat of hell becomes hell for those against whom it is directed.

None of this means sin isn’t real. We lie, exploit, betray, manipulate and dehumanize. We build systems that let us benefit from suffering we never witness.

But these things aren’t sinful because God stops loving us. They’re sinful because they damage our capacity to love one another, the Earth and ourselves. And without love for those three, there is no loving God.

Maybe that’s why Jesus describes love of God and neighbor together. Love your neighbor as yourself. Even love your enemy. No religious belief is required to recognize that.

A compassionate atheist is no less capable of loving a neighbor than a devout Christian. Belief alone is not evidence of moral character. Our behavior is.

Which means salvation needs reconsideration, too.

Salvation can’t be about God finally agreeing to let us back in. God never threw us out. Salvation is what we experience when we heal broken relationships. Repentance is recognizing harm and changing direction. Forgiveness becomes possible when we take responsibility and begin repairing what we’ve damaged.

The opposite of sin isn’t purity. It’s communion.

Our lives are connected. Compassion repairs, and justice restores. Whether you call that a spiritual truth or a human truth, whether you see God in it or no God at all, the work remains the same.

We belong to one another. Period.

Sin is what we call the thousand ways we forget our responsibility to these four relationships. Hell is what we create when we forget it together. And salvation begins whenever we remember.

Not because God has finally decided to love us again. But because we have decided to love one another.

Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church in Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.