@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:
Of course, you and Frank, both, just like to argue, whether or not you know what the hell you're talking about, so I guess I should just advise you two to get a room, and leave it at that.
I've explained many times in many ways what things mean beyond their dictionary definitions. Definitions are helpful, but they are still pretty short and abstract so there is lots of room for misinterpretation.
Defining sin as an 'offense against God' is certainly true, but not in the way that offending a human being can occur due to the subjective biases of the individual being offended. E.g. if you don't like hippy-looking people, you could be offended by someone dressed as a hippy with flowers in their hair, long natural hair, etc. but that is not the same kind of offense as offending God.
Legal offenses come closer to the meaning of sin, but there is still a subjective human element, e.g. if you violate some arbitrary law you have committed an offense against the state, but you might not have actually caused any harm, aside from emboldening yourself and others to disregard the law.
Sins against God are more causal, however, because the universe/creation is a perfect machine without any wiggle-room. E.g. if you shoot someone, the bullet penetrate them and do damage to their organs. There are miracles that happen despite the clockwork of the universe, e.g. when someone gets shot and survives nonetheless, or when they get injured by their suffering is abated in some spiritual way that no one understands.
The laws of physics govern sin and its 'wages,' however, in that no action can occur without equal-and-opposite reaction, no object in motion can be stopped without interaction/friction with an external force. So there's no question when you run full speed into a wall that the wall is going to slam you with all the force you put into it by running into it. God might take mercy on you by letting you fall unconscious sooner rather than later, and your body might take the violence and heal better than it otherwise could have, and those things would all be miracles of mercy/grace, but nothing about the laws of physics that govern the mechanical cause and effect of smashing your body against a wall is abated or tweaked in any way. It's just that the overall situation, including your subjective experience of it, comes out in a way that is less bad than it could have been given the same causal factors.
Like snowflakes, no two situations are the same however similar they may appear; so you can call it "luck of the draw" when the situation that happens to you isn't as bad as it could have been if you were a slightly different snowflake, so to speak; but you can also call it mercy and grace from God. If you interpret in terms of intentional divine agency, you can feel gratitude, whereas if you just interpret it as "the luck of the draw," you won't experience any kind of love/compassion; so belief/faith in God allows you to experience love and compassion from things that happen beyond human control, and that is a good thing.
So in one sense, yes you can interpret sin as offense against God, but not in the sense that it is in some way arbitrary or that God chooses to punish you for things that you could otherwise just freely get away with devoid of cause-and-effect and the consequences that come with that. You can't run full speed into a wall and then curse God for punishing you; or rather you can, but it doesn't make any sense and it makes things worse because then you're going to experience that much more suffering than if you just sustained your injuries and felt love/compassion from God that you didn't get hurt even worse.
