No One Can Take On The Sins Of Another

One of my favorite expressions used to be that in Jesus — ‘justice and mercy meet’. A price for wrongdoing is paid, but I’m set free. It thought it was a beautiful exchange. Now that I’ve objectively thought about it, I realize it doesn’t make any sense. And it’s immoral.

I understand the immense kindness of someone rich paying off my financial debt, but someone innocent being tortured and killed for my mistakes is a totally different moral issue. Those two are not comparable because one involves the violation of morality. How is someone being killed for someone else’s wrongdoings deemed as justice, and not a perversion of justice?

If I was going to jail for stealing and my friend said, ‘I’ll go instead’ the judge would say something like: ‘Justice doesn’t work like that’. And I should feel even more guilty if they had been allowed to go to jail instead of me. Because a moral person does not feel good when someone else is punished instead of them.

The Hebrew scriptures are clear that everyone is responsible for their own wrongdoings, and one person cannot take the consequences from another.

“The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.” (Ezekiel 18:20)

Rabbi Jesus was a person who supposedly took our eternal moral responsibility away from us. This only belongs to a belief system where humans are given infinite consequences for finite actions. There is absolutely no evidence for believing this. We do know that we remain responsible to one another for our human actions within our human life.

Nor is there any reason to believe in ‘sin’. Sin is not the same thing as immorality or wrongdoing. A moral act is one that decreases individual human suffering and/or betters societal well-being, justice, and freedom. An immoral act is one that increases individual human suffering and is a detriment to societal well-being, justice, and freedom. However, a ‘sinful’ act is one that defies or violates religious doctrine or a god’s perceived divine will — regardless of whether that act is moral or not. Examples of sin in the Bible range from things like adultery and theft to wearing mixed fabrics and eating shellfish.