“Have you ever wondered if the Christian image of heaven is true? Like you die and there’s Saint Peter and he’s itemizing your tally of sin?”
“All the time. I mean, I was thinking about limbo just the other day. Like, the idea that sins are weighted differently and the amount of time you spend in limbo depends on the summation of those weights blows my mind. Stealing is what I was thinking about in particular. Like how much worse is stealing a thousand dollars than stealing a hundred. Is it ten times worse? What if you steal one dollar from a hundred people vs. a hundred dollars from one person, is the first way worse than the second? Does personal finance have anything to do with it? What if you steal a hundred dollars from a millionaire? How bad is it to steal if you are already rich? What if the money you are stealing is going to feed your family? How poor do you have to be for it to be okay? What if the person you are stealing from stole that money themselves? What if that person is just evil in general like a killer or something but is not a thief? What if that person stole from you, is it stealing to steal it back? How bad is stealing an essentially value-less but heavily sentimental trinket? What if a theft leads to a victims death, like they can’t pay for their heating or something, is that like a murder on Saint Peter’s check list? What about your age? I mean I stole a ton of stuff when I was a kid like I was a bona-fide klepto. Will that stuff count as much as if I were to steal the exact same things from the exact same type of people now? Or what if you don’t mean to do it, like you accidentally take a pen from the bank. I’ve done that. I’m sure you’ve done that. I mean, we’ve all done that.”
“…”
“Haven’t you done that?”
“I was trying to find a gentle way to tell you it’s your turn to clean the litterbox.”
Are you secretly the author of this comic strip? I like to imagine that you are.
I think the definition of sin has been a bit obscured over the years. It’s been turned into a concept of “stuff I did that’s wrong, for whatever reason.” It’s actually a concept of “stuff I did that separates me from God,” with the accompanying concept that the gap must be bridged.
The idea that sin was differently weighted is due mostly to Catholic cardinals and what have you pullin’ down a pretty penny back in the day with…what were those called…ummmmmm…indulgences! Yeah, pardons, basically. The more serious the crime, the more expensive the indulgence. Funnily enough though, the Catholic church is the Pauline church, which (by original definition) believes that all sin is equal in the eyes of God and that forgiveness can only be found through repentance and Jesus’ death and ressurrection…funny how that’s pretty much been forgotten.
Oh, and actually there’s allowance in the Bible for stealing for survival, but it says you have to pay back what you took seven times once you’re back on your feet. I dunno about the childhood kleptomania though. Might want to make amends, just to be safe. 😉
Let’s see… My sins for the day… Lust, gluttony, avarice, wrath, jealousy, hubris, sloth… Did I forget anything? Oh yeah, I also hijacked a jetliner and crashed it into a skyscraper, and nuked an elementary school. With all those other sins those two got lost in the shuffle.
Let’s face it. I’m just not a choir boy. That extra buffalo wing, and the nap afterwards is what put me over the line, I think.