I feel that the modern understanding of what it is to live without sin is mistaken.
This mistake means that the very worst sinners feel clean and pure, and react incredulously to any notion that they are faithful and diligent servants of evil such as have seldom been seen before on this earth.
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A man who lived without sin is "not" to be defined in terms of a man who objects all true and correct moral "laws".
Rather, the man without sin is he who lives at all times in complete communion with God.
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The correct understanding is only indirectly-related to the modern understanding of sin.
According to the modern understanding of sin, as breaking moral rules, the worst sinner is the one who breaks the most rules, or who breaks the most serious rules.
Therefore, for moderns virtue is measured in terms of behavior - that is in terms of objective, observable behaviour and how it corresponds to the laws of morality.
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But the proper understanding of sin is mystical: to be sin-less is when the human soul is in continuous communication with God.
And by contrast, sin is not directly about behavior but about the soul being turned-away-from God, thereby by choice being cut-off from God - wholly concerned with the self.
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Thus the meaning of Pride as the key sin - pride being the "choice" to prefer one's own will to God's will.
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The modern secular Leftist elites do not perceive their own state of near-complete enthrallment to sin because they perceive themselves to be obedient to all the important laws of morality (especially after these moral laws have been revised and up-dated by people like themselves).
Modern secular Leftists do not recognize that their sin lies in the Pride of having turned away from God and trusting to themselves alone.
Indeed, modern secular Leftists perceive spiritually advanced Christians (including Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Saints) as "sinful" - insofar as they broken the rules of modern morality enshrined in political correctness.
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This is a kind of ultimate in Pride: to set oneself in judgement over The Saints, the Mother of God and indeed God Himself.
Yet some of these people believe themselves to be Christians - and morally more 'advanced' than the Christians of the past!
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We are (nearly) all sinners, humanity is wretched and (almost always) turned away from God and deep in Pride; yet sin is compounded, becomes active "evil", when propagated deliberately, when propagandized, when subsidized, when enforced.
It is in this sense that the modern intellectual elites: politicians, bureaucrats and officials; lawyers; managers; journalists; teachers... are among the most evil people ever to have lived.
They not merely do evil impulsively, they not merely fail to discern evil, but strategically plan the triumph of evil - which they disguise from themselves and others by framing the world to exclude evil.
(By replacing evil with misery, they can do" anything at all" - so long as it can be rationalized as tending eventually, many steps down the line, to reduce the sum 'total' of misery.)
These modern creatures who rule the West (nothing like them has been seen before, except as isolated individuals or minute cults) are cut-off from God; they are nihilists (deniers of reality) and they zealously spread their disease.
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They are "so far gone" that they find the idea of sin, of evil to be incomprehensible.
The reality of their own near-demonic state of sin is therefore literally "incredible" to them.
They lack the concepts to understand "what they have become": because they have willfully-destroyed these concepts, and are now diligent agents of the destruction of these concepts in others.
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It sounds bad: it is.
It sounds "hopeless": it isn't.
I am describing my former self: repentance "is "possible no matter how far gone a person may be, it is "never" too late+.
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+Strictly, never too late" in this world"; for so long as the choice can be framed and presented, it is never too late. Consider the 'Good' thief in Luke 23:
39And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. 40But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? 41And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss. 42And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. 43And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
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Origin: animals-and-shamanism.blogspot.com