I want to piggyback off this into something I've talked about before, but seems ever-relevant, which is that Christianity's approach to screwing up is not normal or healthy on a societal level. (Thread) https://twitter.com/JustSayXtian/status/1265320734596841472

And please read @JustSayXtian's thread first, because it's A) really good and B) I'm not going to repeat it all for you.

But, in summary: Christianity treats sin as a hard dichotomy: either you have never done ANYTHING wrong, even had an uncharitable THOUGHT, or you are a sinner, deserving of going to hell.

Perfection or deserving of an eternity of torture. Those are the only two states.

And of course the solution to this, in Christian doctrine, is Jesus. There's no way you can be perfect for an entire lifetime (and just to stack the deck, in some denominations, you were *born* with sin on you before you even had a chance to do anything about it).

So, Jesus.

But, as @JustSayXtian notes, Christianity *does* have a model for someone who doesn't deserve to go to hell: Jesus. Of course, the deck is stacked there, because he's divine as well as human, but hey, he's also human.

And so by definition, anything he does isn't sinful.

Now, as a non-Christian observer, I might say that if you're going to define even having a passing unkind THOUGHT as sinful, Jesus does all KINDS of sinful stuff.

He comes around, but calling the Canaanite woman a dog is a bit nastier than having a second of lust.

And destroying a *perfectly good fig tree* because it's not bearing fruit *out of season* is a dick move.

(A relatively serious one for a Jew given that trees are... not *quite* people? but entities with rights? in Judaism.)

but while your passing thought of wanting to throttle your boss for humiliating you in front of your entire team is a sin, Jesus actually straight-up murdering a fig tree just minding its own business isn't, by definition, because he's Jesus and perfect by definition.

So as far as I can tell, fundamentally, sin isn't even just inescapable in Christianity--it's intentionally incomprehensible.

And I almost started rehashing @JustSayXtian's thread here, but go read it, specifically the part about the sinful/saved dichotomy and self-definition because you'll need it for the next part.

That dichotomy, as I mentioned in my first tweet, isn't normal for human societies, and it isn't *healthy* on a societal level, because you end up where we are now, which is that we can't move forward on societal screw-ups because we can't even cop to *individual* ones.

(Hence things like white fragility.)

And the worst part is it *didn't have to go this way.*

Let's talk about Leviticus and the sacrificial system.

So Leviticus gets a bad rap because it says some things that, at least as we interpret/translate them, are pretty abhorrent to modern sensibilities (e.g. prohibitions on men having sex with men).

So everyone knows a few *details* about Leviticus and ignores the whole.

So the perception most Christians (whether current or former (including atheists/agnostics)) seem to have is that the setup in Leviticus is that there are all these rigid, detailed laws, and if you screw up on any of them, you're damned, but maybe you can kill a sheep instead.

Which... isn't what's going on.

Leviticus assumes that A) you're a good person, B) you're going to make mistakes and harm people/transgress laws/etc without realizing it at the time, C) figure out later that you screwed up, and D) feel guilty

(side note: Judaism assumes you're basically a good person, and far from being born in original sin, you don't even develop an urge to do wrong until you're a teenager)

(although to be fair, that's from later (Talmudic) discussions, so we don't know what people thought about it at the time the Torah was written)

But anyway, so you fucked up, didn't realize it at the time, realize it now, and feel bad.

What now?

Well, the text also assumes that you've already done everything you can to make substantive (usually financial) reparations.

So you've done all that, what now?

*That's* when the sacrificial system kicks in.

And essentially what it's providing is closure. It's not The Process, it's the formal END of the process.

It's public, which is key.

So essentially, you're saying to yourself, God, and your entire community,

"I recognize that I screwed up, and I've done everything I know how to do to make it right. I'm moving on, I'm asking God to let it go, and I'm asking you all to let it go."

So, functionally, it's both a personal way to release feelings of guilt, and it's also a public request for closure.

So, take a moment and imagine what this looks like on a societal level:

You're constantly seeing everyone around you frequently, publicly acknowledging that they fucked up, but also, that they've made amends and would like to move on.

That *normalizes* screwing up. It doesn't excuse it or treat it as if it doesn't matter (sacrifices cost money, yo), but it does show you that no one's perfect, and that most of the ways you can fuck up are not the end of the world and don't put you outside the community.

And there's also a clear path as far as what you need to do if you screw up.

Now, do I know whether this actually prevented fragility and doubling down and DARVO-ing and fauxpologies and all the stuff we struggle with today?

Nope.

But I do think having a clear path for trying to make things right, normalizing screwing up (and not tying it to whether or not you're a good person), and having a formal and public way to say "I have done everything I know how to do to repair the harm I did," reduces fragility.

And I also think, that if read a lot of ethnographies, you start noticing that most pre-Christian societies had some analogous practice for addressing harms done, ensuring amends were made, and then formally and communally releasing guilt/reintegrating the person who screwed up.

And our societal lack of a formalized, accepted, public practice for doing that is a major problem.