That I May Not Sin Against Thee.

There is a tendency to only think of sin as some predetermined evil, murder, robbery, lying, and the like. A cultural wrong was been committed and discovered, and the wrong is called sin. From a biblical perspective to sin means to fall short. An archer takes aim at a target, releases the arrow, but it falls short of what he was shooting at. He missed the target, his arrow fell short of what he was shorting for. The archer sinned. Every society has to establish moral and ethic targets to shoot for, and though no society can ever hit them perfectly that should not stop them from establishing targets, shooting at them, and holding people accountable who deliberately ignore the targets. But there may be something that is profoundly worse than those within a society that choose to ignore its moral and ethical targets, and that is those who set up targets and then for their own satisfaction, manipulate the unsuspecting person, of any age, who looks to them for help. At least those who choose to ignore the targets are easy to identify. But what does a society do when it wakes up one morning to the frightening awareness that someone stole the targets its' culture was founded on and has been replaceing them with targets, that even if hit dead-center are insufficient to sustain it going forward. This may be exactly where America is today. We have been replacing targets for so long that we know no longer know what a right target looks like, let alone the right height and distance to set them at. The targets we aim at today seem to be those that are much lower to ground and no more than 3 feet away. Like the basketball backboard in my backyard attached to a mechanism which allows it be to drop it from the official height to one  that pratically anyone one can dunk in, the moral and ethical targets in the America of today have been lowered dramatically from those in prior generations. The targets we take aim at today are shocking lower than what our father's fathers knew. Someday we will have to come to terms with this reality that sin is intrinscially evil because whether by commission or omission it always is against people, and we sin because we have fallen short of the hit targets God has set, and one of them is to love our neighbor as ourselves.