Morality and Sin

Readings and Reflections

by Sam Batara (2002)
University of Asia and the Pacific

Historically, morality and religion have been thought to be

related to each other in a number of ways. The earliest view was
that morality is so closely related to religion to be indistinguishable
from it. Morality not only depends upon religion, it is an aspect of
it. This view was exemplified by Judaism, Confucianism and
Buddhism.
The second view is that morality is independent of religion.
This position was evident in the pronouncements of Plato and
Aristotle. However, it was Kant who powerfully asserted the
autonomy of morality.
A third view sees religion as a mere aspect of morality. It was
Arnold who reportedly claimed that religion is morality touched
with emotion. The theologian Ritschl also taught that the essence
of religion is to live from the power of the highest good over one’s
inner life.
The fourth and latest view is that morality not only is
autonomous and independent of religion, but even stronger, it
holds that ethics can perform the functions formerly assigned to
religion. For many educated people today, and as advocated by
John Dewey, ethics replaces religion.
Now sin is essentially a religious term. The word would
hardly be used by someone who did not believe in God. To the
unbeliever, sin is irrationality, or an inability to reason out or
justify a so-called wrong-doing.
And the good Reverend Father de Torre, our Applied
Religion class facilitator, can appear to be irreligiously explaining
what sin is all about. There was no question when he claimed that
drinking and smoking are not sins. It is drunkenness, or gluttony,
which is a sin. In my personal view, a question of moral
accountability comes in when one causes disrespect toward the
personal dignity (either against the body or the soul) of another
person or a neighbor.
That’s why I raised the case, as confirmed by more and more
researches, of active smokers creating some fatal cancer in passive
smokers. Is not the active smoker who works in the same
environment with the passive smoker liable if the former hastened
the death of the latter by exhaling harmful smoke every now and
then?
I understand that originally the biblical word for sin, “to miss
the mark,” was not a religious or ethical expression at all. It was
rather a word taken from the sport of hunting. But later on, the
Hebrew and Greek word came to mean “to miss a goal or way; to
fail to realize one’s potential; to leave undone what God or men
expected one to do.”
Jesus saw sin as the failure to be what we can be (e.g., the
man who failed to use his talent, salt that lost saltiness, fig tree that
bore no crop). Jesus also saw sin as failure in personal
relationships (i. e., the failure to respond to human need, to have
compassion on others, to respect other human beings, and to fail to
love). And, of course, Jesus saw sin as the failure in our
relationship with God (i.e., to do things God’s way).
Here is an area where the values education teacher needs to
be careful by not assuming that all his students are thinking (and
feeling) religiously. Just as what is legal is not necessarily moral, a
sin (in one’s personal view) may not necessarily be a wrong-doing.