Defending the Important Concept of Mortal Sin

Before discussing the rather specific concept of mortal sin; it is more important to talk about the subject of what is called sin, assuming it to exist, of course; and yet, even before that significant matter, it is really best to cover the more general question of whether or not evil really exists; or, is evil itself just a semantic thing having no tangible, genuine, or true relevance to the now presumably advanced world of the 21st century? 

After all, today’s world is supposedly dedicated to the progressive ideological advancement of needed multiculturalism, scientism, technocratic dynamism, elitist environmentalism, political managerialism, and postmodernism (AKA the New Atheism) that necessarily recognizes nothing as “sinful,” meaning, at least, in the old, once-accepted, traditional understanding of such a concept. 

So, both good and evil become, by definition, merely useless or, perhaps, completely archaic concepts now devoid of any substantive or substantial meaning, in either a positivist or neopositivist sense.  Not even the continuing existence of wars, terrorism, genocide, etc. can divert the often assumed march toward the earthly nirvana or, perhaps, the New Eden itself.

There is, furthermore, the intellectually fallacious attempt to just deny totally the principle of synderesis, which fails because, e. g., even nonjudgmentalism is a matter of still making a judgment, even if, supposedly, not to judge.  Some sort of morality is to prevail, among people and in society, in that being truly amoral in all judgments is simply impossible because human beings are not at all, among other obvious limitations or imperfections, temporal gods.  

As is known, liberals and progressives claim that they do not want conservatives to dictate, to force, their morality upon them; and yet, through multiculturalism, forced bussing, affirmative action, racial quotas, etc., liberals routinely have imposed their own morality against others, with the powerful force of law, the might of the State, no less.  Whether or not translated into political and/or ideological terms of reference, therefore, various conceptions of what is thought to be good are pressed against what is claimed to be evil; this is by using a variety of Orwellian euphemisms in the process.

If there is no evil, however, there can be nothing called good either because one supposes the other; therefore, it becomes logically self-defeating to be a true amoralist or someone trying to say that all morals or ethics are totally subjective; the then inevitable conundrum becomes the irrational and illogical case proposed; one cannot claim to have absolute or objective knowledge that nothing can be known absolutely or objectively about anything without entering into a necessary and self-refuting contradiction.

Societies, furthermore, as is well known, have and do establish normative laws against certain activities, including prohibitions upon murder, rape, arson, etc; in turn, the serious concept of law had, long ago, actually originated in theological or religious thinking as to very profound perceptions and understandings of what constituted moral right versus moral wrong; ethics and law, thus, became derivative concepts stemming from these quite usually prior metaphysical considerations as to what religions or belief systems were willing to tolerate as to the doings, habits, activities, and inclinations of human beings. 

Therefore, before there were any actual written laws directly and clearly specifying the matter, there were religious objections present to such things as murder and rape that were then deemed to be the opposite of morally good; they were certainly condemned as being morally evil, not simply just mildly objectionable; so, later, these prohibitions were officially codified conveniently into formal statutes, the breaking of which would call upon the legally convicted perpetrator certain consequences, which could include the extreme of capital punishment. 

Religion, morality, law, and ethics became various ways of concluding that certain serious things were either morally good or evil under certain specified conditions and qualifications concerning human action and its varied kinds of consequences, whether directly or indirectly understood.  Few people, historically speaking, have lived entirely as just isolated hermits untouched or unreachable by social realities or consequences.

In almost all societies that have ever historically existed as such, murder, for instance, has stood as being universally condemned as evil and as being morally distinct from, e. g., necessary killing in self-defense or for the conduct of a just war, which encompasses and incorporates just war theory standards.  The serious evil of murder is, generally at least, well known in that, moreover, few people would truly enjoy seeing someone they dearly loved being murdered; such an act would be termed, would be called, evil by most observers at the least. 

As long as Nazi death camps, Soviet and other Communist death camps, etc. are known about, there will be the perception of the existence of evil in this world, which mainstream Christians also recognize as being, logically speaking, a fallen world.  It can, thus, be reasonably argued that evil truly exists, meaning that human beings do evil things that normally do involve hate, injustice, envy, greed, corruption, malice, cruelty, spite, viciousness, etc. These matters are not assumed abstract and simply dismissible products of the anti-positivist imagination craving an atavistic consensus.

Denying the reality of evil is equivalent to boldly rejecting knowledge about human nature seen as its worst, unless one believes in the ever fictional version of the naturally good man, e. g., as described by Rousseau, a neo-Pelagian crackpot; he loved greatly mankind the abstraction in general but seemed to hate everyone in particular that he ever encountered in his life.  See: John Passmore’s The Perfectibility of Man.

After establishing the particular fact that evil, inclusive of genocide and much else, really exists in this unfortunate world; the next thing to consider is the fact about human imperfection that gets so denominated, theologically speaking, as being sin or sinful behavior, which includes murder, rape, arson, fornication, etc. 

Sin causes, sooner or later, actual pain and cognate suffering of various kinds, either physically, psychologically and/or emotionally considered as such; almost all people, in almost all cultures and societies, most of the time, have and do experience various degrees of shame, guilt, and/or regret of some type, kind or form; these are, moreover, appropriately seen in terms of the seriousness involved with human life across many societies, cultures, and civilizations seen historically. 

Of course, sociopaths and psychopaths are distinct, abnormal exceptions to the rule; some others wish to assume that they are really free of all or any sense or knowledge of guilt, etc. but, nonetheless, do suffer consequences, even if often unrecognized as being real or consequential in nature; this is because they are still, after all is said and done to the assumed contrary, mere human beings, not earthly gods of infinite wisdom possessed.

Admittedly, however, if there really is no God, then there could be no actual sin because sin presupposes the metaphysical order of reality as to the presence of human souls engaged in the important theological or religious battle against evil, athwart sin.  Not coincidentally, the New Atheism strives mighty hard to obliterate, exterminate, the belief in the existence of any Divine Being above the deification of Man on earth, in terms of postmodernism; this is carried on to the nth degree of quite skillful propaganda on its behalf.

The well-known Culture of Death, however, vilely haunts all that is of contemporary society, culture, and civilization with its rampant abortion-on-demand, infanticide, euthanasia, artificial contraception, divorce, sodomy, explosive currents of crescive pornography, etc., which reflects supremely a most dedicated culture of sin, embraced enthusiastically, by literally millions upon millions of people and on a daily basis. 

If sin did not, in fact, ever empirically and verifiably exist as sin, there neither would nor logically could then be a true and visible Culture of Death, especially, moreover, as it so pervasively exists as such in such an impressively wide variety of true degradation and nihilism, decadence and hedonism, galore.   Q. E. D.

And, yes, dear reader, the secular, hyper-sophisticated world that denies the existence of sin seeks to have euphemisms for its own concept and definition of sin in its vocabulary; thus, what the leftist metaphysicians always hypocritically kick out the front door they yet surreptitiously smuggle in through the back door; one sees that, e. g., homophobia is a (secular) sin and, so, homophobic people are, therefore, thought to be socially, culturally, ethically, and morally sinful.   

Whether perceived clearly or not, people cannot, therefore, absolutely or totally get away from thinking in such a manner either implicitly or explicitly speaking.  But, here will be dealt with a more common understanding of the perceptibility of evil as, of course, properly defined by sin.

Since sin (as demonstrated above) exists, there needs to be distinctions made between minor versus major kinds or degrees of sin; as is known, e. g., to the Roman Catholic Church, minor sin has been classified as being venial and major sin as being mortal; the former consists of doing, thinking or saying merely, e. g., unpleasant things about people; the latter covers only truly serious, grievous matters that fundamentally transgress the moral order well beyond normal limits, meaning such acts as murder, rape, fornication, abortion-on-demand, etc.

Mortal sin has consequences that affect the real world far beyond what most people may easily perceive as to the often interrelated and interconnected realities involved; Phillip Longman’s The Empty Cradle explains, in great depth with generous documentation, how the world’s rapidly declining birthrates are definitely threatening this planet’s economic prosperity, human diversity, and major technological advancement; this is, of course, all directly contrary to the overpopulation myth that is becoming more and more of a sick joke — each generation that passes away without enough sufficient progeny. 

The materialistic, secularistic, hedonistic, and, yes, downright ultimately nihilistic choice of self-extermination always easily proves, most convincingly, that the wages of sin, need it be said, is death.  The birth dearth is significantly and undeniably real, increasingly so.  People, on the whole, are just simply living longer, which makes it superficially appear as if there are more people on this planet than there really are in terms of the aggregate numbers involved, meaning concerning the totality of the earth’s population at large.  These matters of human choice are not, however, supposed abstractions or intangibles having no serious implications.

Actual human reproduction rates, as even reported in the documents of the United Nations, are now decreasing rapidly on the whole; and, moreover, those few places experiencing some growth or major increases  are now highly atypical of the existing reality of the birth scarcity being the documented, factual, predominant norm. 

And, moreover, this rather obvious and evil self-extermination is a clear example of a mortal sin being committed, by literally many millions of people, with no attempt being made to reverse this known trend, meaning on a scale truly sufficient to stem this terrible crisis.  What more serious, empirical confirmation could possibly exist as verifiable proof of what is contended, of the existence of sin, as being a truism of human nature? 

The future perceived extinction, mass suicide in effect, of many different peoples, all over the world, offers outstanding testimony that is substantively irrefutable, not simply verifiable, according to the views of many objective observers; postmodernist efforts at national-racial suicide, for instance, are best seen in Japan, though Europe is not too far behind, especially Western Europe. 

In the early 21st century, the (native) Russians, e. g., now have a lower life expectancy for their men than what had generally existed — very early in the 20th century.  In the USA, only  immigration alone, both legal and illegal, helps to keep up the recorded birth rate near a replacement level sufficient to sustain some real population growth; however, among, e. g., most WASPs and most Roman Catholics, the birth dearth is the existing true norm; replacement levels are, thus, not being sustained at all.

Through the important intellectual and moral defense of mortal sin, as a much needed heuristic concept for better integrally understanding and comprehending human reality, often called the human condition, it can be reasonably asserted, therefore, that immorality, evil, has truly actual consequences. 

For further requisite confirmation of the reality existing, one can read such interesting books as Florian Coulmas’ Population Decline and Ageing in Japan – The Social Consequences and Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future by Ben Wattenberg; also, see the War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of Population Control by Jacqueline Kasun.

Athanasius contra mundum!