Thread by @mcjulie

This is an interesting discussion, and it prompted me to want to clarify something --

https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1391626919557410817

First, the concept of "sin" -- a vague & slippery concept which has no meaning outside of a religious context.

Because "sin" is more or less *defined* as an offense against God, while "abuse" is an offense against other people, "crime" is an offense against law, etc.

I think Christians -- especially conservative, purity-culture Christians -- often deliberately use "sin" interchangeably with other descriptions of "bad behavior" & it's done for a deceptive, evil purpose --

One, is to take things like abuse and crime and make them *merely* sins, to excuse them when they're being perpetrated by people the church wants to defend, like Josh Duggar or Donald Trump.

Because, ultimately, a "sin" is an offense against God.

Maybe you think there's no HIGHER crime, but that's really on you. I probably don't believe in your God, so I don't care, and supposedly we live in a country with freedom of religion, so I don't HAVE to care.

The second evil purpose of this type of sin-conflating rhetoric is to take something that is ONLY a sin (as in, it is not an offense against other people, or necessarily against other people's gods) and make it sound like something inherently bad.

Like, if somebody who is Catholic says, "I think some kinds of sexual activity are a SIN" the correct response is "I'm not Catholic, and we don't live in a Catholic dictatorship, so who cares?"

But tradcath religious fanatics on the SCOTUS & elsewhere apparently believe that we DO live in a Catholic dictatorship, or at least that we OUGHT to.

That's the idea simmering just under the surface of the opinions of everyone from Elizabeth Bruenig to William Barr to the late unlamented Antonin Scalia -- that Catholic opinions *ought* to be the basis for secular law & shared culture, that they SHOULD matter to non-Catholics.

Which means sometimes we get sucked into the wrong argument, like, trying to convince the Pope to bless same-sex unions, when really we should be talking about "why do we care what the Pope thinks anyway?"

Sometimes it's like Catholics are stuck in the middle ages & deep down they assume the Pope is actually still the true & rightful boss of everybody.

Oh, for @paulcarp13 's benefit, <the end>