Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

An earlier stage of human consciousness - which we often see in the Old Testament, and many other places - is similar to the way that naughty children of a certain age (about 5?) tend to understand morality. But when a Christian has faith and trust in God as a good parent, he can see thyings in a context of how good parents behave to their beloved children.  Sin is then understood as turning away from God (and our divine selves), and of thinking and behaving against God's loving creation; and this brings adverse consequences. Why? Because sin pits the sinner's will against creation. It's like a child who ignores his loving parents' advice and stuffs himself with sweets until he vomits and feels terrible... Properly understood, the vomiting is a consequence of wrongdoing, not a punishment for it. The child sets his will, impulse, short-term gratification against nature (i.e. against divine creation; which is also against God - as represented in mortal life by his genuinely-loving parents)... and this turning-away-from/ pushing-against real-reality leads to consequences, which are adverse.
 Loving parents make these adverse consequences of sinning more proximate. For instance; by making the child feel bad, i.e. suffer adverse consequences, immediately after wrongdoing; and therefore making it easier for the child to learn.But this carries the risk of the child forgetting, or refusing to acknowledge, that the loving parent is acting for the child's best interests - when those best interests are undertsood in a divine and ultimate context. So proximate punishment from wrongdoing (harsh words, restrictions, a slap) carry the risk of being regarded as engaging in retribution (i.e the child does not make the moral connection) - or (childishly) as sin being 'corrected' by punishment... 
And this attitude creates a potential (but incorrect) disconnection between sin and punishment - a false consequentionalist morality; as if a sin ceases to be a sin when it is not 'punished'...
 An unrepentant child will refuse to admit he has done wrong (sinned, turned away from harmony with divine creation) and therefore regards anybody who thwarts his wishes as The Problem. At an extreme, the greedy child will (like modern, resentment-fuelled, identity groups) emotionally regard the parents as having (somehow) Made him vomit... This is a quasi magical attribution, that seeks covert materialist explanation (e.g. 'implicit racism'.)
Even a mostly-good child may forget, or fail to connect, the adverse consequences with what he did, and 'feel' a punishment as a simple act of inflicting suffering by those with greatest power; and due to a mere difference of opinion. The child may then assume his parents 'must be' acting from malice, or from pleasure in inflicting suffering. (Note: I am assuming here that the parents, like God, are indeed really acting from love.)
 At the extreme of unrepentant sinning (as nowadays), nature itself may be regarded as evil! As when nature stops a man from really-transforming into a real-woman; and this leads to a sense of resentment, greivance, hostility against a society and civilization perceived to thwart 'my' fixed desire - from what 'must be' malicious reasons.And we get an anti-morality of value-inversion characteristic of mainstream, mandatory, leftist ideology;  where reality is contradicted (by diktat). And what is perceived to be a malicious, punishing God/ Christians/ ideological opponents generally - will get blamed for the consequences of Men's sinful actions and attitudes.  One sees this all the time! - perhaps especially in the mass media, which nowadays operates like an advanced degree in unrepented sinning... The Global Establishment, indeed, encourages the masses in first defying and attacking the goodness of God's creation - and then resentfully projecting blame, for the intrinsically-adverse consequences of sin!