A reminder that there's no such thing as sin.

You aren't evil or tainted or flawed. There's no such thing as evil. To be tainted or flawed implies intentionality, authority, and ownership by some other entity over the realization of who you are.

Sin is a method of control which forces you to view the world through a lens built on false concepts of good and evil.

In older versions of the story of the tree that predate what you were taught, the wisdom from the tree was a gift, and the serpent was revered for what it shared and for its own wisdom. Wisdom represented liberation by revealing one's own autonomy and consciousness of their own selves.

In the story you were taught, wisdom and knowledge themselves became the original sin because wisdom and knowledge liberate us from hierarchy, control, and ultimately our own oppression.

Liberation is painted as the original sin in this story, the source of all sin.

The concept of sin is a method of control that requires a scale of authority that does not rightfully exist, because there is no god and no master which has a right to authority over you or the decisions you make. There is no weight, there is no scale, there is no sin.

We build. We destroy. We weave. We unweave. Time is an axis.

You're a person existing in a complex world who sometimes makes decisions that harm other people, like we all do, and you have the agency to make better decisions next time. This is not sin, this is simply complexity, humanity, and the autonomy to choose between building worlds crafted of harm and competition or crafted from care and collaboration.

People who intentionally choose to weave a pattern in the world in order to continually harm others for their own interests aren't evil, either. Because there is no such thing as evil.

But they are harmful.

It's tempting to believe in a paradigm of good and evil because it's simple. In a world where we collectively generally agree that harm is undesirable, believing in evil abrogates any sense of responsibility toward understanding that the systems that we've built, uphold, and perpetuate cause harm, and they must be stopped. They must be dismantled.

The systems aren't evil, but they're harmful.

Believing that a person is inherently evil makes it easy to demonize them for the simple nature of their existence. It makes it easy to stop empathizing, because there is no empathy for evil, empathy is reserved for people if it exists at all within a framework of good and evil. Evil people cease to be people, they are demons who must need vanquished.

Hate is an emotion that, unchecked, can easily frame its source as evil. Emotions can be valid while also misinformed. Emotions can also be irrational. Hate can also be informed and rational. It's difficult to tell the difference without self-examination. It can all feel so eerily similar when left without analysis.

Unexamined hate can also be manipulated.

It's rational to hate a system which causes you harm. It is rational to hate someone who intentionally tries to harm you. It is rational to hate someone who builds systems with the intent to annihilate the existence of you and others like you and people you love.

It's irrational to hate someone simply for being evil, because evil is not real, and it is unexamined. Evil is a thought-terminating cliche. The greatest trick ever pulled was a thought-terminating cliche. Evil is a method of seduction that discourages you from examination of why and how. Evil is a method of control.

Evil is irrational and unexamined.

Evil is ignorance.

Evil requires authority to dictate what it is.

Evil is easy.

Complexity is hard.

Systems are complex.

People are complex.

You are complex.

There is no authority when we have agency and autonomy. We are left to make our own choices. We are liberated. We belong to no one.

What we are always left with is a choice. We must each choose the world we wish to build. A world built on harm or care. A world built on competition or collaboration. A world built on domination or liberation.

We build sandcastles.

We draw pictures on the sidewalk with chalk.

We bury our dead.

Our work will wash away, as will we.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed.

Life springs anew.

All that is beautiful is still ephemeral.

There is beauty in the ephemeral.

There is still beauty in what we create.

It makes no matter that it will wash away, because time is an axis, and there are no ends, only means.

no ends, only means