Can sin be understood as a form of entropy?

[abelisle]

Here is my rudimentary understanding of these two terms.

Sin is the transgression of the law and/or separation from God.

Entropy is the gradual loss of energy in a closed system like a cold glass of water getting warmer when left to itself but not getting colder or that popular saying that things left alone will fall apart.

I've always wondered if there are physical laws that govern the spiritual domain? We are presently beset by a huge cultural paradigm shift between science and religion. But maybe they don't ever have to correlate but rather help us to understand the inscrutable aspects of each?

When man decided to separate himself from God, he then begins a long but steady degradation of existence. Couldn't we see this as a form of entropy?

And finally, before I make a fool of myself, can there be other physical laws that have spiritual applications/connections/meanings?

Alex

[fccool]

NT and the OT have two differnt concepts of "sin". Sin in NT literally means missing the mark. I.e. you are supposed to hit the mark with each shot, but you are missing it. The same idea.

In the OT the words that are translate into "sin" actually denote "iniquity", "trespassing", "guilt incurred".

So, there are two somewhat different ideas. In the NT the idea is that you never really hit the mark. People are sinners in effect that they will constantly miss the mark of perfection.

In OT the idea is quite different. It does not require perfection, but the overall volume of "righteousness" as opposed to "wickedness".

I don't view sin in esoteric terms of either NT or OT. It's not a magical essence that spreads after you do something bad. We should properly understand it in terms of cause/effect relationship, and not in terms of literal phenomenon that's out there to tempt us.

The cause-effect relationship of our actions if fairly straightforward.

1) We do something

2) If it yields positive results that's dubbed "righteousness"

3) If it yields negative results that's dubbed "sin"

We can't separate act from the actual idea. I.E., there's no "sin nature" without humans present on this planet.

[Bravus]

I think we can use physical laws as *metaphors* to help us understand spiritual things, but that it might be dangerous to go on from there to suggest that there are actual strong law-like relationships in the spiritual realm.

I could be wrong about that.

I'm at a place now where I'm not sure the concept of 'sin' is even really useful and sustainable. I concur with fccool's definition above, that sin is defined as that which has harmful consequences. But that doesn't need divine judgment and can be considered entirely within a naturalistic framework.

Perhaps the notion of eternity tips the scales sometimes in terms of which action causes the greater good or lesser harm?

[Ellen]

You can "catch" bad but you can't "catch" good. The sailor who wanted to clean up the speech of his badmouthed parrot, by putting him with the minister's parrot.

In the end the minister's parrot was swearing like a trouper.

there's the comparison with the bad apple in the good apple basket.

[Tom Wetmore]

That might be true if people were birds or fruit.

If bad were truly contagious to humans, Jesus would have been fatally exposed to the sin virus by being born of a human mother and living 33 years on earth as a man, eating and drinking with and touching contaminated sinners.

If good is not contagious, how come I smile and get a spring in my step when someone smiles and offers a kind word of encouragement when I am having a bad day?