Thank you for the excellent thoughtful comments.
In response to your comment: “Ultimately, how can one be guilty of a sin one has no memory of? The person’s experience then is almost as though being born again and now free of a sinful past s/he can no longer remember.”
You have identified a key problem in today’s field of psychology. This is especially true of people in denial. The mind has many powerful defense systems.
I personally define “sin” as anything that creates a space in our souls where “Love” cannot exist. or simply, an obstacle to “Love.” The reason that Love is important is that Love is the glue that holds the soul together. A mother’s Love that creates the emotional bond within a baby is what builds the foundation for a person’s life.
In many ways, failure to love someone is itself a sin. Failure to “Love God” is an even greater sin.
As it relates to remembering, there is a lot more to this than I can put in this post. The number one attraction in relationships (what creates chemistry) is that we are attracted toward someone who’s personality is similar to someone else with whom we have unresolved conflict. (In order to use them as a surrogate to resolve our wound in our soul.) God’s not sadistic, it’s just His way of helping us to cleanse our souls. Often we do not remember the original perceptual programming event that wounded our soul, but yet we are attracted toward a surrogate to bring it to the surface and resolve it.
A year ago I don't think I would have understood your definition of sin, but now I agree with you.
The number one attraction in relationships (what creates chemistry) is that we are attracted toward someone who's personality is similar to someone else with whom we have unresolved conflict.I thank you for "confirming" a suspicion I've had. I was bounced around a bit growing up, which might be a reason why I was a bit of a late bloomer in pretty much everything, including dating.
While trying to figure things out by watching family and friends, what you describe is what I saw them struggling with in their serial dating, relationships and marriages.
It was always interesting to me how when raising kids was a part of the relationship how those issues really popped up to the surface causing all kinds of problems, which now makes sense given what you've said in your post.
Unfortunately, it's also sorta twisted how what is designed to cleanse us can instead do the opposite.
"Wash, rinse, repeat until the stains are out" seems to be the universal subroutine, but it only works well if the feedback loops aren't disabled. Otherwise, one's cycle gets stuck in repeat.
The mind can rationalize anything, so it's fairly easy for it to get stuck and then just make things comfortable in denial.
So often when life's little perfect storms come against us in the wrong moment we just react, perhaps out of habit, by repeating the original mistake(s) and thus perpetuating the damage.
Sad, too, how the damage in people then gets passed along, often from one generation to the next as though forging another link in a long chain of inheritance.
Fortunately, as you've talked about frequently, we also have what we need to break every link in those chains and it doesn't require a prescription. It only requires constant use.
And it's a fun habit to acquire, too! A total game changer in every way.
Thank you, again, for your posts here!