The Mechanics of Sin

Originally Posted 4/10/2011

I'm gonna talk about sin, trust me on that. But I'm going to talk about sin from an angle I promise you've not heard often, most likely you've never heard anyone talk about it the way I will. I promise. But give me just a bit, so I can set it up so I CAN talk about sin and not sound like the preacher man down at the church, OK? Thanks.

Most of my life I've worked in with technology, one form or another. Which means that most of my life I've been working with science after a fashion, the same rules apply. Somewhere about the middle of my life technology went stale for me, it's just kind of passé now. Ok, the guys and gals dialed it up another notch, fixed this, invented that, they can now do the same things a bit faster, a bit more convenient. Good for them, I'll buy one when the old one wears out. It isn't that big a deal anymore, not to me. What is a big deal to me is how people live, technology or no technology, and the parts of how people live that technology really never has effected at all are getting to be more and more important to me all the time, trying to really understand the world you and I and everyone has to share.

Of course, when you turn away from one thing to focus on something new you take with you what you already know, you can't help it. Same for me, of course. So as I've been looking at people, the societies and cultures, the conventions and the morals, of course I've been drawing on the things I learned when I worked with technology, things learned from the realms of fire and steel. And amazingly, a great many of the same relationships still apply. The parts and pieces are different, but the patterns and responses are very much similar, in some cases identical. So now that I've wandered through a couple of crazy eights here I can go ahead and talk about what I was wanting to talk about, hopefully without everyone saying WTF is he meaning, and going on to something else.

A lot of the things we all deal with in life are pretty well diluted. You know what diluted means, it means a little of the real thing is mixed in with a lot of something else. Lemonade is sour old lemon juice diluted into a sugar water solution. Lemonade. A whole lot of the big players in life are much the same: Politics is a little wisdom mixed in with a whole lot of greed, Religion all to often a little of God mixed in with a whole lot of man. You get the picture.

The first thing I want to say is that Sin, real sin, the kind that trashes out a life, leaves that life damaged for a long time and does real harm, that kind of sin almost never shows up in the pure form, it's almost always diluted with something else. It has to be, nobody would touch it in the pure form, it wouldn't take half a second to know "hey, this shit is no good for nobody, leave it alone." So sin has to figure out a way to get itself diluted enough that folks don't recognize just how much damage it can do until it's way to late to do anything about it. But that really doesn't make sense, does it. How can sin get itself diluted, to where you don't see how much harm it can do when you first encounter it, and yet still be the kind of sin powerful enough to trash out a life?

The answer to that is like another thing sort of related to dilution. To the science folk it's called volatility, vapor pressure. But those are fancy words for something everyone has seen. Take a pan of water, set it in the sun, come back a day later. Pan is still there, but the water is gone. Do the same thing with freon? Freon goes away faster than you can pour it in, all you got is a frozen pan and no freon (and not quite so much of an ozone layer to protect you from that huge H bomb burning in the sky called the sun). Kerosene? Well, with kerosene you'll probably have to wait a week or three. Gear oil, like goes in your car? Give it up, it takes longer than you'll live to see any change. And then there are some things that don't evaporate at all.

The main point I'm trying to make is that sin, real sin, does not evaporate, it doesn't go away. Now the things the sin was diluted in, so it could hide and not be known? Those do evaporate, they just flat go away. Young? Confused? Hurt feelings? Anger? Those all evaporate, different rates, for different reasons, but they all go away eventually. And as they go away the sin that doesn't evaporate just gets more and more concentrated, more and more toxic to the life where the evaporation is going on. That's how real sin works, and it is sneaky, and it can take it years, decades, before the poison of the sin gets concentrated enough to start doing harm to a life. But sin doesn't care about that, sin is patient.

Think on that for a bit, think about the folk you've known. See how many do indeed look like something is just chewing on them more and more. See how many of them keep on doing more and more different kinds of diluted sins, so at least the sins aren't concentrated, to keep the old sins dilute and weak. Of course, that's a loosing game, because the more sin you take in the less has to evaporate before your life goes to hell in a hand basket. Yea, it happens. You've seen it. Now maybe you have a bit of an idea why.

I'm sure here all along you figured I was eventually going to get around to talking about sin the way everyone else does, you know, the relative moral and ethical considerations of tats and piercings, giving head or giving hand or just giving in, the balance between taking your licks before you get some illegal jollies, for wanting to, or afterwards for having done it, I'm sure you figured I was going to lay down the law about making love to someone of your own gender or trying to make love with someone wearing more rope than a load of hobo furniture riding an old pickup truck down the highway. Nope, I'm not. Not my business. There's plenty of sin in those things, there is, but there's plenty of sin as well in showing up at church every Sunday and forgetting everything the preacher was trying to say as soon as you shake hands with him to go back to your real life of trying to screw someone out of a dollar whether you earned it or not. Life if full of sin in just about any direction you want to look. Way more than I care to try and speak to.

No, I just wanted to talk about how sin really works, kind of the mechanics of the matter because no one seems to really speak about it from that angle, so folks can understand how it really works and defend themselves from it. We've all seen the burnouts where sin took their life away from them, one way or another, and left them to live long enough to suffer having been robbed. Yes, we all have. Hard to admit sometimes, but you've seen 'em and so have I, don't say you haven't.

Oh, and how do you get sin back out if you think some snuck in? You get it out by diluting it again, but with the exact opposite thing that it used to sneak in with, that will usually do just as good a job of diluting sin as the other. You dilute it back down, and you let it wash out instead of in. Just keep pouring the solvent to the situation, and let it wash back out. You may not get all of it, but you can wash away so much you can live with what's left without your life looking like what's left of the town after the battle moves on. Love dilutes sin just as well as hate, kindness just as well as cruelty. You can take my word on that one, I know what I'm talking about. Been there, done that, only wear the shirt on the job.