Sin?

[savedbygrace05]

What is sin, why does it exist and how do we respond to those who deny its existence?

Other questions on this subject later!

 

[cam44]

Very simply put it is turning away from God's instruction due to one's own self-interests.
It exists to differentiate those who respect and follow the Father from those that do not as a basis for HIS judgement, not for us to judge one another.
You might not convince those that deny it- some people refuse to see the most simple and well structured reasoning/example/arguement.

 

[Genersis]

Sin is an Abrahamic concept best summed up as breaking God's rules/going against God's will.

The best way to convince people it exists is to convert them to an Abrahamic religion. As it's kinda a prerequisite...

 

[ianb321red]

What is sin, why does it exist and how do we respond to those who deny its existence?

Other questions on this subject later!

The answer to the origin of sin from a theistic point of view is quite simply because of God's gift of free will.

Although freedom is good IN ITSELF, it also allowed the potential for evil. Therefore, free will made evil possible.

While God is responsible for this freedom (and this makes evil possible), free creatures THEMSELVES (eg. Adam, Lucifier) are responsible for THEIR acts of freedom (which makes evil actual). God gave us the power of choice, and instead of choosing to obey and follow good, they disobeyed and exercised free choice for sin.

Therefore evil arose from the free will of good creatures that God created.

What is sin? It is simply a misuse of free will and this has therefore allowed sin to enter the world and destroy God's perfect creation. This is imperfection is understood when compared against God Himself.

Proverbs 6:16-19 lists 7 sins:

16 There are six things the Lord hates,
seven that are detestable to him:
17 haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
18 a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
19 a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.

 

[Paradoxum]

Sin seems to mesh immorality, imprudence, foolishness, and impiety, all under the one category.

The non-theists generally accept most of the above as bad, except impiety, since they don't believe there is a God who are they rejecting, ignoring, or insulting.

 

[King Mob]

What is sin, why does it exist and how do we respond to those who deny its existence?

You need to define it first, one man's meat and all that...

 

[tonybeer]

The answer to the origin of sin from a theistic point of view is quite simply because of God's gift of free will.

Although freedom is good IN ITSELF, it also allowed the potential for evil. Therefore, free will made evil possible.

While God is responsible for this freedom (and this makes evil possible), free creatures THEMSELVES (eg. Adam, Lucifier) are responsible for THEIR acts of freedom (which makes evil actual). God gave us the power of choice, and instead of choosing to obey and follow good, they disobeyed and exercised free choice for sin.

Therefore evil arose from the free will of good creatures that God created.

What is sin? It is simply a misuse of free will and this has therefore allowed sin to enter the world and destroy God's perfect creation. This is imperfection is understood when compared against God Himself.
.

I can imagine a much better world, but still with free will. Not everything bad in the world is induced by humans. There are many horrible diseases that I'd get rid of. They affect non believers and believers in equal measure.

When a girl is being raped and she prays to God for help with no answer, he must determine that free will is more important than saving her from this ordeal.

 

[lismore]

The non-theists generally accept most of the above as bad, except impiety, since they don't believe there is a God who are they rejecting, ignoring, or insulting.

But then if they insult 'God' it's offensive to people who believe in God.

 

[ianb321red]

When a girl is being raped and she prays to God for help with no answer, he must determine that free will is more important than saving her from this ordeal.

All I know is that there are many examples of when prayer IS answered.
I can't really comment on hypothetical examples such as yours - but the immediate hypothetical question in return is WHICH God was she praying to?

Having said that, I can confirm that not ALL of my prayers have been answered ...... make of that what you will

 

[tonybeer]

Ok yeah that is a hypothetical. However scientific tests looking at the effects of prayer have been done with the result of prayer being ineffective. This is the one that was most in depth and with the largest sample size HMS Press Release:

Not that means that there is no God, it's either that or there is no point praying to him if you have a heart condition.

If there was a single instance of prayer actually acheiving something that couldn't be achieved by a normal means then there would be thousands of scientists looking at it and writing papers. God doesn't heal amputees.

I was however talking about sin and how the world could be a better place without losing free will. I'm sure you can imagine a better world too keeping free will.

 

[ianb321red]

Not that means that there is no God, it's either that or there is no point praying to him if you have a heart condition.

Fabrice Muamba?

Fabrice Muamba thanks God after miracle recovery | Christian News on Christian Today

 

[tonybeer]

So that was God and not the doctors then? Just because people prayed doesn't mean that was the reason he got better. I can almost guarantee you had he not had the doctors help he would have died.

Just because you pray for something and it happens, it doesn't mean that prayer is what is causing the effect.

This is why you need a large sample size and have to compare the effects of prayer versus non prayer. If you take every time prayer appears to work, and ignore every time it does not, and also ignore every time the effect happens without prayer then you are being completely biased and you have no knowledge of how we tell what is real and what is not.

 

[ianb321red]

So that was God and not the doctors then? Just because people prayed doesn't mean that was the reason he got better. I can almost guarantee you had he not had the doctors help he would have died.

Yes, but his body still to had to respond to the treatment that the doctors gave him. Who or what controls or determines this?
I'm not diminishing in anyway the dependency he had on the doctors, but equally doctors are clearly not always 100% successful in the treatment they administer.
For every successful heart operation there is an unsuccessful one.

I agree that he would have likely died with no help from doctors, but this is irrelevant in this case so we have to deal with the facts specific to what actually happened.

Just because you pray for something and it happens, it doesn't mean that prayer is what is causing the effect.

I agree. There is a placebo effect, and I am well aware of people taking advantage of this...

This is why you need a large sample size and have to compare the effects of prayer versus non prayer. If you take every time prayer appears to work, and ignore every time it does not, and also ignore every time the effect happens without prayer then you are being completely biased and you have no knowledge of how we tell what is real and what is not.

This needs further clarification on several levels because it simply throws up far too many questions:

What source would you derive the sample from?
What would be the composition of the sample?
What would be a robust enough sample size?
What god or god(s) would be prayed to?
How do you evaluate, define and measure 'non prayer'?
How would establish whether a prayer was answered?
If a prayer was answered how could you establish which god actually answered it?
How could you prove that an effect of non prayer was not actually a god or gods intervening anyway?
What timescale would you allow a god or gods to have answered a prayer or prayers within?
How would you deal with counter claims of different gods answering the same prayer?

There are many other questions, but these are the ones that spring to mind..

 

[tonybeer]

I wasn't the one that claimed God helped heal Muamba, you are! You have the burden of proof to show that prayer helped in a non placebo way.

Did you look at the link I posted? If you can find the actual scientific paper (it should be referenced in the article), then you can see how it was done. If you can think of a better way of doing it then by all means email the scientists who ran the study.
I didn't run the study, but all your answers will be in the published paper. I think it was Christians praying to a Christian God. The sample size was 1800-2000ish. Prayer actually fared worse than non prayer.

A good way to run a study would be the following:

Take 1000 Christian amputees. They all pray to God to have their limbs grow back. We have no examples of limbs growing back on their own so can conclude with reasonable confidence that prayer is what has helped if a limb has grown back.

 

[MikeBigg]

When a girl is being raped and she prays to God for help with no answer, he must determine that free will is more important than saving her from this ordeal.

I'm not convinced that free-will was a gift that God chose to give us. I think that free will comes as a result of His nature.

In my view, love and control are mutually exclusive. As God loves and is love, that prevents Him exercising control over us - thus, free will.

I was talking with a woman a few months ago about God's love and demonstrated God's love to her by praying for her to be healed - and God did heal a couple of conditions. Next time I saw her we talked about the healings and asked "If God loves me so much, where was He when my boyfriend was beating me up?" and gave other incidents where she had been abused by men and asked where was God when these things happened ?

I must admit that any explanation of freewill really didn't cut it compared to the feelings of rejection, abandonment and hate that this woman feels.

Regards,

Mike

 

[tonybeer]

Mike - 2 questions:

If you could have stopped this man beating this woman would you?

If you were God would you have stopped this poor woman being beaten?

 

[ianb321red]

Did you look at the link I posted?

Yeah - I read it.
It came across as a bit mickey mouse, hence the questions I mentioned previously...

You can try and answer them if you want?

 

[ianb321red]

Did you look at the link I posted? If you can find the actual scientific paper (it should be referenced in the article), then you can see how it was done. If you can think of a better way of doing it then by all means email the scientists who ran the study.

I've looked at it again and it looks like that in trying to "standardise" prayer, the study introduced a major flaw, since most intercessors tend to pray led by the Spirit, instead of praying prepared scripts ( God would not hear those kinds of prayers anyway as they were continuous)

And the results showed that groups 1 (prayer) and 2 (no prayer) were identical

The 3rd group (those who knew they were being prayed for) did worse than the other two groups. The lack of efficacy of prayer in this study could be due to theological problems with the study design.

 

[ianb321red]

Here's one, albeit with a smaller sample size:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3393937

 

[tonybeer]

Yeah - I read it.
It came across as a bit mickey mouse, hence the questions I mentioned previously...
You can try and answer them if you want?

I feel very uncomfortable doing this as it is not my study and I don't want to misrepresent anything. I include two things. The first is an article in a scientific magazine. The second is the abstract of the actual study.


The 1,802 patients were divided into three groups, two of which were prayed for by members of three congregations: St. Paul’s Monastery in St. Paul, Minnesota; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Massachusetts; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City. The prayers were allowed to pray in their own manner, but they were instructed to include the following phrase in their prayers: “for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.” Prayers began the night before the surgery and continued daily for two weeks after. Half the prayer-recipient patients were told that they were being prayed for while the other half were told that they might or might not receive prayers. The researchers monitored the patients for 30 days after the operations.
Results showed no statistically significant differences between the prayed-for and non-prayed-for groups. Although the following findings were not statistically significant, 59% of patients who knew that they were being prayed for suffered complications, compared with 51% of those who were uncertain whether they were being prayed for or not; and 18% in the uninformed prayer group suffered major complications such as heart attack or stroke, compared with 13% in the group that received no prayers.
This study is particularly significant because Herbert Benson has long been sympathetic to the possibility that intercessory prayer can positively influence the health of patients. His team’s rigorous methodologies overcame the numerous flaws that called into question previously published studies.



Abstract

BACKGROUND:

Intercessory prayer is widely believed to influence recovery from illness, but claims of benefits are not supported by well-controlled clinical trials. Prior studies have not addressed whether prayer itself or knowledge/certainty that prayer is being provided may influence outcome. We evaluated whether (1) receiving intercessory prayer or (2) being certain of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with uncomplicated recovery after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery.
METHODS:

Patients at 6 US hospitals were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: 604 received intercessory prayer after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory prayer also after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; and 601 received intercessory prayer after being informed they would receive prayer. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting the night before CABG. The primary outcome was presence of any complication within 30 days of CABG. Secondary outcomes were any major event and mortality.
RESULTS:

In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.
CONCLUSIONS:

Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.


Hope that helps!