There is no god in modern society. There was a time when humans sought to ascend to that role through the sciences. Now even the most prominent figures of society resides within itself; society, the human sphere; an earthly one that we are born into and die in. Yet human abstraction is unchanged. Society itself is seen as a being with a character of its own; the collective presence that never physically exists is only made whole by the shared views of the many. It is incapable of acting by itself, yet it compels millions to action. This inanimate figment is no substitute for an animate god that itself formulates its own judgements and casts its own justice.

Forgive the derivative postmodern deluge, it is just that the flood of transformation has left an open landscape in which I simply wish to plant the seed of question while the soil is still wet. Truly, I write this because I do not know the solution to something that will be of great concern in the coming years.

How is sin forgiven without god?

I do not mean "sin" in a theological sense, despite the invocations of god this is not a religious piece of writing. I write of sin as the action that proves a being immoral in society. In a society of morality, it is the action in which a person loses their humanity to the collective by consequence of an inhuman action. We are leaving the realm of thought where crime is only an infraction upon another; where punishment is a penalty in the playing field of the market. We transition to a moral society, where crime is not an infraction against another, it is the contrary to the humanity of society itself.

Justice follows as the victory of the absolutes good and evil, and rightly so. Moral crime in a moral society is the essence of "big crimes"; the takedown of the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, the condemnent of the sexual abuses of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, the prosecution of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd; the legal crime aligns with the moral crime to punish the perpetrators traditionally and strip them of their humanity; their social citizenship so to speak.

A moral society has moral crimes. A moral society has no place for the immoral. Before the introduction of christianity and modern philosophy dictating a regularized system of punishment that maintained individual right there have historically been 2 punishments for moral crime; exile and death. While our society today thankfully does not have the same amiability to death that ancient societies had, exile has always been the choice of punishment for a once moral person that commits a sin against their society. To be born of sin, to be defined as selfish market actors fighting for survival, we have culpability, for crime in said case is the abuse of our nature. Today, we are born just. A moral crime is not a failure of our reasonable sensibilities, but an alternation of the goodness of human nature by a conscious and aware inhuman act. The immoral have no grounds to participate in society for they are not part of it. We have no moral law in our society today. Our society is not however without moral punishment. A victim of moral crime is a question of identity for the whole of a moral community. By force of the abstract ideal, the principles of the collective invoke the many to uphold the goodness of society and the perpetrator is effectively exiled from participating in society.

I have no stance on the proliferation of moral punishment. Indeed I cannot deny the wrongness of those brought down by what has been referred to as "cancel culture". I also do not believe that we as a species are weak and desperate enough to fall to the right's "slippery slope" argument that we will continuously target lesser and lesser moral crimes with the absolute punishment of exile until the point where the collective ideal is completely stripped from any individual capability of achieving it. I do believe that in a moral society, in the modern era, we are lacking the force that goes hand in hand with sin; repentance. The only recovery from moral crime is forgiveness. As we deal more with moral practice and moral punishment it is of the upmost importance that those who have committed moral crime be given a route back to humanity, back to participation in society. Who is to give forgiveness for the collective? How is forgiveness possible if there is no natural culpability to moral crime; that a human with goodness in heart would never be capable of immorality.

I do not know how we move forward without a path of redemption. If indeed wrong is committed, there is nothing gained by exiling the embodied wrongs. Repentance cannot exist without forgiveness and forgiveness cannot exist without the belief that with repentance can emerge a stronger community, that by learning to be moral, we can become even better people than our moral teachers, and have an awareness of what is right that can extend beyond the sight of those who have never had to overcome the evil within themselves.