Moving out of Shame: Adaptation, Survival Instinct, and Sin
Our collective obsession with sin is actually a collective obsession with threat and a deep sense of a lack of safety held in shadow. Sin becomes the scapegoat for our deep existential fears and inability to mitigate social and environmental threat effectively, including such things as illness and death. It's easier to control human behavior when we place the central focus on sin because then our focus is on shame and blame or demonizing the human experience and placing a need to atone for being a human-animal (which is weird when we really think about it). We can and do create all kinds of stories around that, including stories of salvation and redemption and apocalyptic end games. All of these things are just ways of dissociating from present-moment time, which is where the Queendom/Kingdom is really existing.
When we shift our focus back to the felt sense of the body and the truth of the body and its regulatory mechanisms, we can begin to understand human behavior and why we do things as we do, which has less to do with a snake in a garden and a certain apple and more to do with the evolution of nervous systems, evolution in general, and adaptation. We understand that our bodies are so very intelligent and they are always responding to cues of safety and threat.
As we come back home to our body and its survival instinct and learn how to work with and for our nervous system, suddenly sin and the philosophies proposed around it seem less important. Human error/behavior is no longer a central obsession or something that needs to be dissected, controlled, contorted as an expression of evil, and demonized. Rather, it is simply information that helps us interpret what is safe vs. unsafe, healthy vs. unhealthy, and how its effects can create tensions and traumas held in the bodies of all involved, which can be released and transformed with the right therapy, practice, and education.
Something to keep in mind that I think many of us intrinsically understand, especially those of us coming from religious abuse, is that the spiritual philosophies surrounding sin and right and wrong behavior or necessity and the application of said philosophy to real-world scenarios don't so much work in our modern day. Here, I advocate for compassionate evidence-based therapy and qualitative research to guide us. Science and reason can meet our spiritual needs and don't have to be either/or. We need to be willing to outgrow old and archaic ideas and be willing to examine their efficacy against the evidence presenting and what is in the present-moment time. We need to adapt our understanding and rewrite the script.
Wo(man) was not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath for the wo(man).
Our spiritual philosophy needs to be adaptable and evolve, like all living organisms do, or else it is useless and it is no longer living.
Bury the book that can't be added to, because it is now a corpse.