Sin

I’ll take your theologically loaded term, sin, rather than crime. As I understand things, some laws, the violation of which leads to crime, are well worth violating—for instance the “If thou art Black thou shalt sit at the back of the bus.” I hadn’t thought about it, but I suspect that a great many laws that begin with “if” are worth violating. So sin is the violation of some rule, prohibition, behavior that does not adhere to a general truth—for instance the truth that “All men [by which one is to understand humans as a whole, I presume, at least nowadays if not in 1776] are created equal.” No “if” there, and of course it stands exactly against the “if” of Jim Crow.

 

In the biblical tradition it stands to reason that the first sin is the violation of the edict that A&E should not violate the prohibition against eating of the fruit of moral knowledge, good and evil. I’ve always thought that the fruit itself is irrelevant since the will knowingly to violate the prohibition is itself acknowledgement of the distinction between good and evil. But if one’s going to be dramatic then some action, the taking, the eating, the savoring, the dawning awareness of guilt, and so on—all of that is necessary for a good story. And the continuation in the loving self-sacrifice of god in the guise of a human follows as further drama.

 

In the Catholic tradition, kids before the age of reason, as they call it, before age seven in the conventional accounting, are not capable of making the distinction between good and evil and so kids are not, indeed cannot be “sinful.” They can break rules to be sure, but such behavior is not a sin per se. At any rate, I think the most general of truths is not the avoiding of moral knowledge. If it were we’d all be running around like kids breaking rules but not sinning. I realize it’s kinda low-brow to say, but nonetheless it seems likely that the most general of rules, the most truly sin-producing as well as law-breaking, is the plain old golden rule.

 

If I’m supposed to treat others as I’d wish to be treated myself, and if I fail to do so, then I’ve committed a sin. By the way, I’d extend the “other” here to all creatures great and small, although I acknowledge fully that were a mosquito or a flea or a chigger to molest me, I’d retaliate lethally if I could. And I suppose I’d be obliged to go to confession. Forgive me father for I have sinned.

 

In the great scheme of things, then, how would I consider an all-powerful being who allows or, depending on the flavor of the theologian’s notions, creates a world in which some critters can exist only at the expense of violating the golden rule. I’m not considering the mosquito or flea or chigger as moral agents, mind you, but rather conceiving of the stance of an all-powerful being who creates a world where such critters can exist only in such a way—or for that matter a gorgeous tiger who must kill to subsist, or a beautiful hawk who must snatch the baby rabbit from its hutch so it can eat. And so on. I hear already the line from Paradise Lost, “and without thorn the rose,” which points to the innocuousness of a prelapsarian creation. Presumably mosquitos and fleas and chiggers had an alternative lifestyle back then.

 

But what am I to think of such an all-powerful being? Ah, of course—one cannot plumb the mysterious ways of god. Sort of the theological version of shut up and eat your oatmeal. My take on such all-powerful being is slightly different. The golden rule does not depend on some such being to articulate it. It’s an emergent truth, palpable in every human interaction, although not always on a short-term basis.

 

Just think what the US would think (if a country can be said to think) were some foreign power to intervene to get rid of cockwomble for us. We would certainly not like that done to us. And  yet we did it to Iran in 1953, and to . . . add however many countries you want, and you will note that the outcome of such interventions has always been the opposite of what we wanted. In Iran it took a couple of decades for the consequences to become obvious, but we didn’t treat others the way we would want to be treated, and the sin was ultimately punished.

 

So experience leads to the emergent truth of the golden rule. No need to invent a middle man, whom the theologians would call god, no doubt, to articulate the law that separates the good from the evil.

 

So sure, I’ll use the word sin to denote those actions that violate the transcendent, if I may use that term, rules of human behavior. But as far as I’m concerned sin does not depend on the dictum of some all-powerful being. No need for a god that transgresses the most comprehensive of such rules, at any rate.

US : Iran :: Japan : US

The attack on Iran made me think of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that made me think of how Japan may well have considered the US for the hundred or so years before 1941.

Consider the American 19^th century from the perspective of the Japanese Empire, then—leaving aside Perry’s forcible opening of Japan to “trade” in 1853.

 

From just before the Civil War, the US had expanded tremendously from its east coast origins. It swept away nation after nation as it moved to the west. In the 1840s, having had its citizens infiltrate the territory, it annexed Texas. In treaty with the UK, it acquired what are now the states of Oregon and Washington. As a demand after the Mexican American War, it acquired California, Nevada, and Utah. Right after the Civil War, the US purchased Alaska. OK—all of that is territorially part of North America.

 

And then came the Spanish-American War, when the US quite deliberately attacked the weakest of the European Empires in order to show that it was more powerful than that empire and in order to establish its expansionist agenda beyond North America. In the Caribbean, it acquired Puerto Rico and, for all intents and purposes, Cuba. In the Pacific, where no doubt the Japanese had a much much more focused interest, it acquired the Hawai’ian islands in the same way that it had acquired Texas, by infiltration. And then there were the war prizes—Guam, Wake Atoll, and the Philippines. Guam, Wake, and the Philippines are all about two thousand miles from Japan.

 

Between Guam, the Philippines, and Japan there are the Micronesian islands, an archipelago of small islands that is small in land area but covers a vast area of the western Pacific. And then there’s Okinawa, only 400 miles from the main Japanese islands.

 

Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879. After WW I the League of Nations mandated most of the Marianas islands to Japan. Buffers, perhaps.

 

And there it stood between the end of WW I and the start of WW II. US territories on one side, Japanese territories on the other side, divided not by fruited plains or purple mountain majesties, but by the Pacific Ocean.

 

Again, between the founding of the US and the beginning of the 20^th century, the US had swept away nation after nation in asserting its manifest destiny. It had warred with Mexico to cement its annexation of Texas, and in the aftermath of that war had acquired great swaths of western lands. It had purchased more lands, both from Mexico and from Russia, and acquired more by treaty.

 

Was Japan to think that the US would stop its westward expansion with Guam, the Philippines, and Wake Atoll?