The word “sin” drips with centuries of religious baggage, conjuring images of fire and brimstone preachers and penitent souls begging for redemption. But what lies beneath the surface of this concept? In this episode, we’ll embark on a journey through the history and philosophy of sin, tracing its etymological origins, its central role in Christian thought, and its surprising resonances with ideas from Greek philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the religious traditions of India. We’ll explore sin’s paradoxical nature as both a stain on the human condition and a path to transformation and transcendence—the pharmacology of sin.
Welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible, a podcast about philosophy and religion. We’re continuing today with the interrogative approach I took on the last episode about salvation, which I’d rank in my top 10 episodes. I’m very proud of it. It’s certainly one that I had to work the hardest on—just relating information about history and discussing ideas is challenging enough, but in that episode I asked a question and set out to answer it and that was another level of difficulty. I think I did pretty well though. In this episode, the question is, what is sin? Not just in terms of what theologians have said that it is, but for our purposes, is it something real apart from general wrongdoing?
First the matter of the general definition: sin, as understood in the broadest theological sense, is wrongdoing which transgresses and separates one from the divine. That takes on different meanings within different religious traditions, but while there are parallels in the Dharmic religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and probably other categorizations I don’t know about—the concept is centrally Abrahamic and even more centrally Christian. Sin in Judaism and Islam is a matter of significant importance and the relevant Islamic concepts form quite the complex system but in Christianity it requires a fully-fleged hamartiology, a theology of sin, because it is sin which (somewhat ironically) justifies the entire religion. Without sin, the death of Jesus would be no more important than that of any other religious teacher in the Bible; Jesus would be only a failed messiah. Only in Christianity is the threat of sin so grave that God must incarnate in the world as a human and die in agony to answer it.
The English word sin has quite an interesting etymology. Its translations in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin are interesting as well, and we’ll get to that in a moment. The word has been maintained in various spellings since Old English. Tracing it back to its reconstructed Proto-Indo-European roots, the general consensus is that it derives from a root meaning “truth,” and even further back, just “existence.” That would relate it to the Middle English sooth, whence soothsayer, literally a “truth-speaker,” someone who foretells the future, and forsooth, an intensifier meaning “truly,” and even to the word is, the third person singular conjugation of the English verb “to be.” The theory, if the Online Etymology Dictionary is to be believed, is that one might ask if someone is guilty of some wrongdoing, and the response would be given, “in truth!” as a way of affirming the guilt.
A little further on we’ll be looking at Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” For the time being, let’s just look at the words translated as “sin” in that verse in the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. In the Koine Greek of the Septuagint we have hamartíā, which is where we get that word hamartiology, the theology of sin. Hamartíā is a broad term encompassing mistakes and failure. If you’re throwing a spear and fail to hit the target, that’s hamartíā. In modern Greek it becomes amartíā and still has a connection to the general meanings of error or failure but is used almost exclusively in a religious context. Then, in Latin, we have peccātum, which is “offense.” This is where we get the English word impeccable, which means that something is so perfect, so “sinless,” that there’s no possible way anyone could find fault with it or be offended by it.
The word sin first appears in the Bible in Genesis 4:7, in which God speaks to Cain after Cain’s offering of fruit was found unsatisfactory. Here it is with the preceding verse for context: “The LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” It’s a strange verse but the way I take it is that God is saying to Cain, “Why so glum? You’ll do better next time. Focus too much on your failures and things will go badly for you.” Sin is translated from chatta’ah, a particular incident of sin, rooted in chet, sin in general. This is the first mention of sin but it isn’t the first incidence of sin, at least insofar as Christianity interprets the Old Testament. That incident would of course be the disobedience of Adam and Eve in eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the original sin. Now, that is almost certainly not the way the original authors understood the text; it’s not understood that way in Judaism, for which that same verse is also scripture, nor in Islam, which doesn’t recognize the Bible as a scriptural authority but which does feature a parallel narrative about Adam and Eve.
At this point we enter into the full complexity of Christian hamartiology, which involves about 1500 years of textual authorship and interpretation (or more) through multiple cultural lenses. The standard critique of the naive atheist takes such a textual complexity as being in itself sufficient to dismiss the entire narrative as having any relevance for us. A more critical perspective understands that all texts are interwoven with their histories and interpretations, that there is no basis for taking “original intent” as being semantically definitive. Christianity has been quite rigorous in working to uncover the thread of sin in its texts and history; Christian hamartiology is a remarkable theological accomplishment which should not be dismissed out of hand. At the same time, to suggest that such a hamartiology is present in full in the scriptural texts is simply a lie; modern Christian hamartiology manifested only gradually over the course of the first several centuries AD and in particular in the work of Augustine of Hippo.
Christian hamartiology begins with the War in Heaven, when the angel Lucifer rebelled against God out of pride. This is the true original sin, the manifestation of sin within the sacred order. The Luciferian rebellion is strictly necessary. Only by rebellion can God be truly sovereign. Lucifer, the Lightbringer (per Isaiah 14:12), now called Satan, the Accuser (per Revelation 12:9), is cast out of heaven, an event which simultaneously casts sin into the created world. Sin then infects the nacent human creation and Adam and Eve are inspired to rebel and attain the fruits of divinity which are set before them but denied them by law. Only deliberately can one fail to see that there is a purposefulness to the Fall in the Garden of Eden narrative. The Tree of Knowledge was present in the Garden for a reason.
To be truly free, humankind must be capable of disobedience. To truly love God, humans must be capable of sin. Satanism, in my interpretation, is motivated by a recognition of this inherent antagonism within the Sacred.
Let’s return to Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Read this verse on its own and you might be inclined to think that Paul is offering you an alternative between death and eternal life. Death comes from sin, and eternal life comes from Jesus Christ. Actually the message of the chapter in total is quite different.
Romans 6 responds to the question of whether it is permissible (or even desirable) to continue to sin after one has accepted the gift of vicarious atonement, a position described in the 16th century as antinomianism, from the Greek meaning “against the law.”
Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.
Romans 6:3-5
Paul describes faith in Christ as a kind of death by which we participate in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and thus die to sin. This also relates to the new birth (under which people describes themselves as “born again”) which is discussed throughout the New Testament (e.g. John 3:6-7) but I think only Paul acknowledges that being born again requires a kind of death. This theme appears again in Colossians 3.
Georges Bataille wrote in Inner Experience,
“The idea of Salvation comes, I believe, from the one whom suffering breaks apart. He who masters it, on the contrary, needs to be broken, to proceed on the path toward the rupture.”
We are broken one way or the other. By this means is everything brought into account.
The title of this episode is “The Pharmacology of Sin.” Pharmacology is the scientific study of the effects of drugs and chemicals on living organisms, and is rooted in the Ancient Greek word pharmakon, a truly fascinating word which encompasses multiple contradictory meanings. One of its descendent in modern Greek, fármako, translates quite directly to the word “medicine” in English, but in Ancient Greek it can be understood as meaning something which could either be a remedy or a poison. This accords with the medical philosophy of Ancient Greece and the moral philosophy of Aristotle, both of which focused on balances between extremes rather than on normality (Chapman, 2023). That shows up in Modern Greek in the word farmáki, which is a venom or poison or something unpleasant and bitter. Plato describes writing this way in the Phaedrus: writing can preserve knowledge, but can also lead to the neglect of memory and understanding. Curiously, it can also mean scapegoat, a concept which originates in the Book of Leviticus:
And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.
Leviticus 16:21-22
A bit earlier, Leviticus uses the word “scapegoat” directly, translated from the Hebrew azazel, which some of my listeners might recognize as a demonic name or a name for Satan himself, but it’s actually not clear that that word refers to the goat. Depending on how you read the vowels into the Hebrew word it could be taken to mean “strength of God” or “goat who escapes” (whence the English scapegoat). But this is in any case a fascinating practice. Leviticus 4 and 5 give instructions for the sin offering, a sacrifice made in payment for individual sin. But to remediate the sins of the entire nation, you transfer them into a goat and chase it into the wilderness. It makes sense that you couldn’t just sacrifice the goat after it receives the sins; you don’t want to offer your damaged goods up to God.
One thing that interests me here is the differentiation made in Leviticus between individual and communal sin, and how that operates in the sin offering and the scapegoat ritual. This is very speculative, but it seems to me that one can atone for individual sin by offering a sacrifice in a sort of crime-and-punishment arrangement, but for communal sin—not just individual sin in aggregate but sins enacted through the social order itself—a sacrifice won’t work because there is no one person for whom the sacrifice operates. The sin belongs to the community, which is an abstract relationship rather than a concrete entity. You’d have to sacrifice the whole flock, and then you’re fucked, so that’s out. So the first thing you have to do is invest that sin in a concrete being, and then you don’t have to worry about atonement because it’s just a goat and you can just get rid of it.
Now, in Christianity, the entire system of sacrifices presented in Leviticus has been abrogated by the death of Jesus, the “final sacrifice” for all sin. Judaism transitioned to a less sacrifice-oriented religion as well after the destruction of the Second Temple in the 1st century. But starting in the 16th century in the British Isles and continuing through to the early 20th century in the Appalachian region of the United States, we see the fascinating practice of sin-eating. Someone dies, and their family pays someone, the sin-eater, to eat a meal in the presence of the corpse. The sin-eater thus absorbs the sins of the deceased, allowing the deceased a favorable afterlife, and the sin-eater is thereafter ostracized.
First John 3:4 states that “Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.” That’s the New Revised Standard Version; the King James is a bit different: “Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.” Transgressing the law is quite a different matter than rejecting the law wholesale; the NRSV is closer to the Koine Greek, where “lawlessness” is translated from anomia, which is quite directly “without law.” Compare to Paul the Apostle writing in Romans 3:20: “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” Also Romans 5:13: “For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law.” Both authors are likely referring to the Law of Moses, although I’m not completely certain of that. Paul’s point is that the law tells us how exactly we sin, but that obedience to the law is insufficient for justification with God. John is saying something only a little bit different but altogether more radical: sin is not any particular violation of the law but is in fact lawlessness in general. Now, he can’t possibly mean that only people in lawless areas are sinners; what he’s talking about is more a matter of personal governance.
After you’re born, you’re indoctrinated into language, a voice which is not your own which possesses you and which has authority over you. You can choose what to say but the building blocks with which you say it are not of your making. In using language, you become the voice of the symbolic order. It structures and shapes your desires, forms you into the voice of those desires. This is the big Other in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the authoritative presence of the symbolic order, and Slavoj Žižek (2006) described God as the “big Other personified.” The authoritative dimension of the symbolic order is something that Jacques Lacan described as the Name-of-the-Father, which is something of a pun in the original French: Nom-du-Père, when spoken rather than written, can either be “Name-of-the-Father” or “No-of-the-Father,” highlighting the role of the concept in authoritative prohibition. Lacan saw this abstract, authoritative presence as being inculcated by the role of the father in parenting, and it’s not something any of us can do without under Lacan’s analysis. Lacking the Name-of-the-Father, there would be no ground establishing the objectivity of meaning with which we interact in language-use. Under Lacan’s analysis, this would be a form of psychosis, a total detachment from the world of signification. This also seems to be what John is getting at in his analysis of sin, which becomes then a moral detachment from the tradition of meaning embodied in the community. That also fits with the analysis of the scapegoat ritual in Leviticus I presented earlier.
In the speculative fiction novel Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, there is a people called the garuda. The garuda have only one crime, which they call choice-theft, and it’s exactly what it sounds like, denying another garuda the possibility of free choice. For the garuda, freedom is the highest value, but they understand that the individual is not the atomic Cartesian subject—which they call abstract individuality but rather something which is constituted by a community of free agents. Concrete individuality, then, is freedom which exists inseparably from that community. Miéville is very overtly influenced by the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and I think what Miéville is driving at here is a fictional representation of Hegel’s distinction between Moralität, the morality of the individual, and Sittlichkeit, which is typically translated as being the “ethical life” of the community.
In my last essay on salvation, I described how humanity is very much on the wrong track, and I don’t think that’s going to be an especially controversial point for my audience. But what can we do about it?
At the root of the general failure of humanity is human behavior. Everything that’s happening—war, genocide, the degradation of the environment, and so forth—is happening because of the collective action of every individual human being. We know that human existence need not be this way, because it hasn’t always been this way and in fact wasn’t this way for almost all of human existence. Whether or not we can live with our various modern conveniences without simultaneously destroying ourselves is an open question, but as a simple matter of fact, there is—or, at least, was—no less than one mode of human existence which is not self-destructive. But while we observe collective effects, it’s important to remember that these effects emerge from the behavior of individuals. Things are the way they are because of what everyone is and isn’t doing.
We tend not to think of things in these terms. When people complain about the pricing or policies or product quality of the telecommunications company Comcast, for example, the proper noun “Comcast” tends to be the prevailing subject of the sentences constituting that complaint rather than the actual people whose actions have resulted in those prices, polices, and products. And of course it couldn’t possibly be otherwise: there are likely hundreds or thousands of people directly involved in those results and it’s unlikely that Comcast customers would know their names. We have to talk about the collective of Comcast in order to have the conversation at all. But it’s important not to let this communicative necessity fool us into thinking that there is a singular entity called Comcast which makes those various decisions. That entity does actually exist, I believe, but it is constituted by the beliefs and behaviors of individuals, has no independent existence beyond that, and is not capable of independent decision-making or action. Human action is the medium of the action of Comcast as an entity.
I think that what sin comes down to—not in terms of how religion has framed it over the millennia but in terms of its essential structure and function—is the relationship between our concrete and abstract realities. The human perspective is intrinsically warped, always already distanced from the perspective of humanity or of nature. This is somewhat paradoxical: the perspective of the individual is the manifestation of human perspective writ large, but that’s not something that we intrinsically understand.
In Indian philosophy, the Sanskrit word avidyā is typically translated as “ignorance” and refers specifically to ignorance of the nature of the self and of reality. I think there’s a strong overlap here with the underlying conceptual structure of sin. There are some differences between Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, but the general theme is that failure to understand the nature of the self and its relation to the Absolute is the root cause of suffering. Ignorance, under this analysis, is dualistic: on the one hand there is some concept, typically tied to the atomic individual self, and on the other hand, some other concept which signifies something broader, more fundamental, and more abstract. Wisdom, in these traditions, understands that those things which appear separated are in fact one. To take an example, in Hinduism, the Sanskrit word Ātman signifies something close to the English word “soul,” and Brahman means the Absolute, the ultimate reality of the universe. Within certain schools of Hinduism, such as Advaita Vedanta, Ātman and Brahman are seen as two different perspectives on the same fundamental thing. Buddhism rejects the existence of Ātman entirely.
You may be wondering at this point how this relates to Satanism, especially given the individualistic bent of Satanic religions in general. That question actually relates to one of my earliest essays, dating back to when this whole project was just a blog: “The Divine Hedonism of the Mind,” which looked at the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in relationship to Satanism. The key point here is that you can’t have an individualist religion, or individualism of any sort, without a proper understanding of what the individual actually is, and if your understanding of an individual is that of an isolated, atomic, purely self-directed and self-determined Cartesian ego… I don’t think such a thing actually exists. This means that our friend Anton LaVey, who would have endorsed exactly such a description of the individual, was, in doing so, succumbing to Satanic Sin #4: self-deceit.
The individual is socially constituted, strictly relational in nature. This doesn’t negate individualism in any way but rather defines the parameters for what that actually means. My individuality and freedom are dependent on the originality and freedom of others. This isn’t some call for cooperation and humanism; in some cases it may mean uncompromising opposition to some subset of humanity. I have said before that I am constituted as a Satanist by the social configuration of Christianity. Were Christianity not what it is—inclusive of both the good and the evil sides of the religion—I would not be what I am as a Satanist.
Sin is, perhaps, our fallenness from the perspective that understands the abstract reality of our individual being, from what Hegel called Sittlichkeit. It is the signifier of a lack inherent within subjectivity, an empty space, the site of a wound where we have been cut off from ourselves. “Fallenness” is not exactly the right word here, though, because we were never in that position in the first place. This fallenness is something constitutive of human experience. When we understand that this is the situation, we can work within it. Problems arise when we understand sin not as a condition of human experience but as something someone does or has done, doesn’t do or hasn’t done. This is explicit in orthodox Christian theology: Romans 3:10, “None is righteous, no, not one.” I think that’s correct, actually, but what seems most dangerous is not our lack of righteousness in itself but rather the lack combined with a refusal to acknowledge it. The people who believe that they are in fact righteous are the people we need to be most worried about. This is the pharmacology of sin, the paradoxical position that we are condemned by our sinful nature precisely at the moment that we think we are free of it.
Works Cited or Referenced
- Bataille, G. (1943/2014). Inner experience (S. Kendall, trans.). State University of New York Press.
- Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of normality: Neurodiversity and capitalism. Pluto Press.
- Miéville, C. (2000/2022). Perdido Street Station. Del Rey.
- Žižek, S. (2006). How to read Lacan. W.W. Norton and Company.