Editorial July 9, 2018 Issue

Some surprising things about sin

Kim Crooks Korinek

“Sin is like picking up a boulder,” a friend explained as we were taking a walk one day. “The boulder isn’t actually a part of you, but when you pick it up, it becomes unwieldy, even painful, and you carry that boulder until you wake up to the fact that you can put it down.”

So what is it about sin? Ministers and preachers denounce it, advertisers may flaunt it, and people can have a mighty struggle with it—whether it is with the theological concept of original sin or just attitudes and actions such as pride, theft, lust, apathy, or neglect. Sin’s fundamental implication is that we are isolated from, or can isolate ourselves from, the source of all that is good, pure, and holy; in other words, we are separate from God.

My friend’s boulder analogy is a vivid illustration of one of the tenets of Christian Science, given in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: “We acknowledge God’s forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts” (p. 497).