This should be interesting
Obviously you have become the gate keeper of ‘HOW WE ASK QESTIONS’ on this site.
Good luck Don, BTW there may be more others who would have liked to hear your response to the question. Your frivolous contempt to my frivolous acronym is of itself frivolous.
Yepper.
My point exactly, how can it be sin, if they are doing it and do not even realize it? As Jesus commanded ‘Judge not’ and I think it was for that very reason. If there is no intent, there is no sin.
BALONEY!
I haven’t got a clue as to what your question is! Also I made NO frivolous attempt concerning your acronym. I have no idea what your acronym means, and I don’t intend to waste my time trying to find out. If you aren’t honest enough to ask an honest question, just go on rolling your eyes.
Well I’ll say it again…
But I think I have been honest, more honest than you can stand. You are just at a point that you don’t like my response, and I can understand that, and that is what some here have been saying…
There is a fundamentalist idea of ‘SIN’ that has permeated our ‘Christian Culture’, and from my standpoint is gobbledygook. Your definition of SIN is totally within your right to believe, but please understand there are alternative views.
Thank you. I didn’t realize that that was the question you wanted answered. It is sin if it harms people. The one who commits that which harms people may not realize that it harms people, but that has no bearing on the fact that it does harm people. So it is sin whether the sinner knows it or not. Why? Because his actions harm people.
However, Jesus understood that the consequences for the sinner who does not know will be less than for the one who does. Here are a portion of Jesus explanation of a parable that He gave:
And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more. (Luke 12: 47,48 ESV)
Sometimes we don’t see where anyone is being harmed by our wrongdoing. But that doesn’t change anything. Do you know why the creators of the website asked that? If not, how do you know that those creators are not themselves being harmed.
Also, you may be harming yourself, by reinforcing your position that lying is right when you do not see the harm it does.
However, having said that, I must affirm that NOT all lying is wrong. Indeed some lying is morally RIGHT, if it facilitates the carrying out of a higher moral imperative. For example, saving a life takes precedence over refraining from lying. Thus it is morally right to lie in order to save a life. Corrie Ten Boom did it in order to save many Jewish lives. When the Nazis asked her where she was hiding the Jews, she answered “Under the table.” They thought she was just making sport of them. However, her answer was literally true, since under the table there was a trap door under which the Jews were hiding in her basement. Yet her statement was a lie in the sense that she was deceiving the Nazis.
In the area of morality I hold to hierachalism, the view that moral imperatives can be arranged in a hierarchy where some take precedence over others. Thus I believe that the moral imperative to save the Jews’ lives took precedence over the imperative to refrain from deceit. That’s why it was morally RIGHT for Corrie Ten Boom to deceive the Nazis.
QED qaz… IF for example in the securing of employment you indicate having read every jot and tittle of a given document, where in actuality not quite literally, THEN the higher moral imperative takes precedence in that in securing employment you cease being a burden to anyone else and in fact become a more effective contributor to society.
If you want, everything can be rationalised.
Was Corrie resisting evil? Would Tolstoy have excoriated her for that?
Up above, where Paidion last posted on this thread, Corrie TenBoom. And of course I’m just inquiring as to the outer limits of what constitutes ‘do not resist evil’.
Is lying to save lives resisting evil? If we would not, for instance, resist someone trying to hurt our child, then why resist even the Hitler-types to save the hidden Jews.
I don’t ask this in a contentious way - I have read the book Don recommended, and there is a lot to chew on in there. This is one bite. 
Corrie did not resist the Nazis in the sense of using violence against them. She only foiled their plan to kill the Jews. I think even Tolstoi would have approved of that. There are also means of protecting your child from an aggressor without shooting him.
I heard of a woman who prevented a man from raping her by telling him that she had a venereal disease (It was a lie, but it worked). Again, I don’t think Tolstoi would have disapproved. I think that he wrote against the concept of returning evil for evil—attempting to kill or wound the aggressor.
That resonates with my reading of the book you recommended.
Tolstoy’s position is so passionate and extreme that I find I have to step back from it and try to get some perspective. Sorting out little scenarios like ‘Corrie’ and ‘protecting your child without doing violence’ helps clarify what the limits are of his position. Thanks.
Possibly you have been misunderstanding him as not being resistant to evil.
Tolstoi wrote Anna Karenina in 1877. Two years later, he became a disciple of Jesus, and understood this to mean obeying the instructions of Christ as given in Matthew 5,6,and 7. He was then dissatisfied with the way Anna Karenina ended and wrote an alternative ending in which interestingly, he had one of the characters bring up the standard type of objection to Jesus’ teaching that is prevalent in our day in arguing with Levin, one of the principal characters who had just had a spiritual experience:
“Fancy, if you were going along the street and saw drunken men beating a woman or a child — I imagine you would not stop to inquire whether war had been declare on the men, but would throw yourself on them, and protect the victim.”
“But I should not kill them,” said Levin.
So it wasn’t that Levin would stand by and do nothing. It’s just that he would not resort to violent action against them.
There are many ways to oppose evil without violence. Let’s consider the non-violent success of Mohandas Gandhi and also that of Martin Luther King Jr. They both opposed evil and fought against it with non-violent resistance. And both of them had been heavily influenced by reading the writings of Tolstoi!
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I did not know that!
Thanks for fleshing out the meaning of resistance. I’d welcome any other thoughts you have on that.
Don can’t, but what he believes is because it is in his DNA, or if we look at it from another idea his meme.
There is a specific logic to Don’s right and wrong (at least to me) but it is his view…
… Though I would admit I would probably want him as my neighbor verses some other folks
We are who we are.
This is kind of fun, am I sinning?
Qaz, I’m not trying to prove that any particular wrong action is harmful. The suggestion that arose is that if you don’t know that your action if harmful, then you are not sinning. I am saying that this belief does not hold water. The fact that you are unaware of any harm that results from your action doesn’t imply that there is no harm caused by your action.
For example, in a recent post, I lashed out at Maintenance Man in anger. I wasn’t aware that this might harm him in any way. But perhaps it did. If so, then I sinned in doing that.
We are assuming you don’t even know that it is harmful.
If you don’t know that it’s harmful, how can you explain how it is harmful
Back to my example. Suppose MM was deeply hurt by the tone of my post, and that it was an attack on his self-esteem. That would have harmed him, not physically, but in his mind. It would have been a putdown.
I didn’t think about that at the time, but I considered that possibility later. If it did hurt his ego, then unwittingly I sinned by doing it. As the saying goes, “Ignorance is no excuse.”
On the other hand there may be cases in which I wasn’t sinning. Suppose in giving a person what I thought was his medicine, I had unwittingly given him poison. That one is questionable, although a court in law, while not charging me with murder, might still give me some kind of consequences such as a number of years in prison.
Again, I ask, "Why did they ask you to affirm that you had read the terms and conditions? Is it a mere formality, or does the company benefit in some way? If they don’t benefit, they why do they ask? If they do benefit, then by falsely checking “yes”, are you not negating that benefit?
Don, maybe you could just tell qaz why you think his position is sin.
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