The cost of SIN in Your Pocketbook and Mine

Sin costs. It costs in more ways than anyone can imagine. This article defines the real cost of sin to our society:

Take God out of the picture. What are the consequences of a child growing up with only one parent, a mother, who is dependent upon government largess and coercive child support programs to survive? Poverty, for one thing, is much more likely in this fatherless home. The child is more likely to grow up contemptuous of work and of school. He is more likely to be crippled by drugs, alcohol, depression, and delinquency. Rather than taking care of society, as we have expected new generations to do, this child is much more likely to need society to take care of him.

More and more people and politicians have come to couch every issue into economic terms. This is a flawed viewpoint, but say we accept the premise anyway. What is the biggest economic problem in America today? It is simply sin. Everyone now agrees that the best way to a productive society is to have people emotionally well-adjusted, physically healthy, well educated, temperate drinkers, good and interested parents, strategic financially (e.g. people who save rather than always spend), and who provide for family members and others a private social safety net.

A society that condemns sin and urges people to reject sin produces just that sort of people. Couples marry before they have children; they raise children in a two family home; they work, stay sober, care for family members and members of their church or synagogue, draw happiness and confidence from religious faith, plan ahead, study (how quickly we forget, in our infatuation with public education, that the idea of literacy was uniquely religious in origin - Jewish boys and Scottish girls and boys were the first children compelled to become literate, and the reasons had entirely to do with religious injunctions. Sins of omission and sins of commission bring us into a society which must be supported by props of massive social programs, huge public relations campaigns, and an enormous amount of our energy. And all this does not work. Pseudo-morality simply makes us feel better for awhile. When people begin to believe that sin is a myth, then they lose all immunity to the soul disease which will slowly kill them.

Because our Leftist overlords of education and culture have scolded us for thinking sin is real, we become ashamed of wanting to minimize sin in our society. What Bill Clinton did, for example, was despicable, but what was the response from the bosses of establishment punditry? "Everyone lies..." was bad enough, but they had to push the envelope against any idea of sin "...and often lying is therapeutic." Lying to Nazis about D-Day may be good, but making mendacity chic unleashes the monsters of our lusts. And even for people who are not particularly religious, the economic costs of pandemic dishonesty are almost incalculable.

We must stop calling sin a weakness and calling it for what it really is, SIN. It is costing us all to call it anything less.