casting the first stone

Oh it's a time honored practice in philosophical and other thoughty essays to begin with a definition of terms, I believe that book we just read did a lot of it, you generally take a word like, oh, sin, that has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people, but then you say for the purposes of this discussion when I say sin will mean doing something that you know is wrong.  I did leave out that phrase, in the future I shall include it.

Discrimination is probably one of those words like, oh, gay, that has been appropriated to include another meaning.  It happens all the time, it's no big deal.  You can still use it in an earlier meaning, if you say you are a discriminating beer drinker, as I, ahem, am, yellow beer indeed, nobody will think that you are a beer drinker who doesn't like Jews or whatever.  And there is still some of that old meaning in the new meaning.  I'm sure those cigar and brandy gents thought that keeping what they considered riff raff out of their club was being discriminating.

We have our thoughts and we have our actions.  We don't really have control over our thoughts, they pop willy nilly in and out of our heads.  But we can control our actions.  Well not quite, but basically it's true.  So like I have my disapproval of hunting, but when it comes time to vote on allowing you hunters to marry, I have to set aside that disapproval and vote to allow it because it is only fair after all.  And of course I think you should likewise set aside your equally irrational disapproval of gays to allow them to marry.

I believe that is the center of the orbit we have been circling for some weeks now.  I suppose it is okay to avoid them in social situations, but I assume you were civil to that former boyfriend of your daughter's and that guy who does your taxes, and I don't think you have a lot of social activities anyway.

In the book sin was used in relation to the Catholic Church, and I think you would agree that those folks know their sins.  They did invent original sin, and they had all kind of sins, well they had venal and mortal, and I don't if there are other kinds too.

Remember talking to the Catholic kids on the block when they got to talking about their religion and all the different kinds of stuff in it, and realizing our turning the page to psalm 362, and reading the Sunday Pix (is that what it was called, that little two or four page comic strip of biblical stories?) Methodist Church was pretty bland dishwater indeed?  I'm surprised I didn't convert right then and there, except that there was always something spooky about those Catholics, like you never knew when you were going to trip over some little detail and end up burning in hell for the rest of eternity.

We Methodists had the ten commandments, and I think we had the big sins down, but I don't think we had the little ones down like covering your head in church or eating meat on Friday.  It seems like we were against drinking and gambling, I think.  Because I left about the time I became a teenager, I never heard where we stood on sex. I imagine we were against adultery and heavy petting.  Whatever happened to heavy petting?  You never hear about it anymore.

In the case of that parish in the book, those guys were told by the Catholic church what was sin, so because they accepted the teachings of the church, and knew the church called what they were doing sin, they were sinning.

Remember the apocryphal story about how you are out with your Catholic friends on a Friday night, and realizing that they have forgotten it's Friday, you urge them to get the sausage or the pepperoni pizza, and then when it comes you remind them that it is Friday and then you get to eat the whole pizza by itself?   

So that's what I mean, it has to be something you know is wrong, and you have to do it knowingly.  And you are telling me that for the purposes of this discussion you have never sinned?  Back in your youth, you never let your sister get the blame for something that you did, you never lied to get out of some chore, you never maybe cheated someone on a deal by pretending whatever you were selling was worth more than it actually was?

Damn, I better beware of you casting the first stone.

You know that casting the first stone thing, if nobody is without sin than nobody stones that poor woman, but if there is a sinless Beagle in the crowd once he casts the first stone I assume anybody can cast the second, the third, the forty-second.  Maybe we are better off all being sinners, or at least that poor woman is.

I should probably go on to examine this, but it's late in the morning and I don't want to bother.  See starting the day with a sin, the way of the sinner.