Is the word “sin” outdated?  Most atheists and agnostics say it is. The government says it is, secular establishments say it is, The Doctor says it is (season 7), and even many ministers and churches, attempting to modernize and present a new, seeker friendly front, have let the term and the concept fall by the wayside…

If you believe that sin is old and out-dated, do you have a list of things which in your own mind are either right or wrong? If, for example, a couple of large hairy men entered your dwelling and carried off your TV, never to be seen again, would that perhaps be wrong in your eyes? Would you call the police, or not? If they moved into your house while you were out, and changed the locks so that you couldn’t enter, would that be wrong? Is it perhaps “right” to save the planet from pollution and certain destruction? If you would answer “yes” to these things, I would certainly agree with you. So then, some things are, to our natural minds, “right” and some things are “wrong”.

So what’s the difference between the words “wrong” and “sin”? Is it just that those things which in the past were called “sin” are not now considered to be wrong, and that therefore the word “sin” is outdated? Sin then can be considered an “old” word for “wrong”, because what was once called “sin” was the “wrong” of those olden times. The only difference between your current definition of wrong and the old view of sin is that “wrong” is what you personally-and perhaps others- deem to be wrong, whereas sin was what someone else once declared was wrong-in this case, the Biblical God.

Why should we live by new views of right and wrong rather than the “old” definitions: because the government says that I must? Is it now all down to government enforcing and propagandizing the new, politically correct morality and way of things, so that we really have a new secular, humanistic “church” called “government”?

If you disagree with the Biblical God’s view of wrong, called “sin”, you are making the conscious decision that you will throw all fear of possible consequences and judgment out the window, and you are concluding that you are a better judge of what’s right and wrong than God is. Ask yourself: is that a wise course of action? Have you personally gone to great lengths to determine that there really is no God, or that if there is, you know he’s happy for you make all your own decisions about right and wrong?

What will you do when someone else whose idea of right and wrong is different to yours walks into your house and takes your TV? Worse than that, what will you do if the entire political and cultural atmosphere of the nation changes so that what you call “right” is declared to be wrong? Will you then agree that definitions of right and wrong must be changed again because your idea of those things are now out-dated?

Does real, solid, objective truth evolve? Does it not make sense that a universe governed by immutable physical laws, such as the laws of gravity, also operates on objective spiritual laws? And what if the creator of those laws-if we assume for a moment that there is one-has his own ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong?

I suggest to you that the man who ignores the facts and the possible consequences of God’s idea of wrong-doing, calling sin “out-dated”, cannot in the long-run fare any better than the man who believes he can fly and so jumps out of a twentieth-floor window.

• APOLOGETICS