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In Christian traditions, there is a term that is widely used and at the same time largely misunderstood. It is the concept of humanely sin. Though it is a profound concept that tries to understand what it means to be human in a balanced way, it also comes with its own disambiguates. It sets the foundation for the fact that man can do both good and evil and thus living on continuous ups and downs which actually is the true definition of life. It doesn’t seek to define humanity artificially as an entity that is good inherently. This is a good perception in the way it empowers and makes people responsible for their own actions by acknowledging free will and the freedom to choose. But on the other hand, the concept of Sin seems to be understood by most of us as a byproduct of the existence of good and evil meaning many of us actually believe there is such a thing as innately good (divine) and innately bad (devilish). This way of observations opens lots of doors to paradoxes and confusions. The most common of them is the question that if GOD has created everything and if there is such a thing as inherent evil then that intern means there is evil in god. And there are confusions with regards to how to respond to people which we consider as doing evil or evil. This understanding of the world from the duality context of good and evil actually leads to justified hatred meaning it’s only human to hate back the people that hate you first. And this completely “misses the whole point” of life itself.
Now let’s try bringing a different perspective into the picture. This perspective though seems new; it was actually the original one that our great forefathers meant and it can be seen clearly if one wishes to do so but this perspective has been cluttered by so many layers of abstraction that it lost its basic meaning. Tracing the word Sin through the Greeks and Jewish literature we will find two words that have the same meaning (Hamartia in Greek and Hatta in Hebrew and Hatiate in Amharic) which is defined as “to miss the objective/purpose/point”. So in the old times when the term Sin was actually coined the definition of a sinner was actually someone who didn’t understand the concept whether the concept was Sex (Adultery), Life (Murder), Love (Idolatry, Disrespect), Synergy (Envy), Compassion (Anger), and Sharing (theft) than actually being inherently evil. So when someone cheats or commits a sexual act of immorality it means the person didn’t fundamentally understand what sex is and why we were given this divine blessing. And the only way out of it is repentance, acknowledging the wrongness of the deed through the use of our heart’s scale and then seek a better understanding of the wisdom behind. If a man cheats, he should first acknowledge that he has traded trust (something priceless and eternal) for lust (something that is temporary and of no destination) and then seek redemption through forgiveness and changed heart/mind/understanding.
Now, this perspective unlocks a whole lot of opportunities to understand our paradoxes and confusions. This way of seeing the world shifts the definition of life from “the battle between good and evil” to a “the pathway between not understanding and understanding, a journey to enlightenment”. This shift would actually create compassion towards sinners than resentment since we know they’re doing what they are doing because they didn’t get it and as a matter of fact their true self is the one that is actually suffering in the darkness. It breaks the cycle and unlocks an ever ending journey. It shifts the focus from We and Them to me and my enlighten self. And answers to the paradox that god might have evil inside by reimagining God as absolute enlightenment and evil is complete ignorance. So life is no longer a duality of good and evil but rather a monality of Love, Light, and Life.
Coming to our countries context it seems we’ve been tied up with the biggest of the sins all along and the sad part is we seem to be blind towards it. We seem to miss all the points and not only some. We’ve missed the point on our understanding of knowledge, wisdom, education we’ve missed the point on our understanding of cooperation, synergy, and unity, we’ve missed the point in our understanding of society, culture, identity, we’ve missed the point in our understanding of work, value, wellbeing and most of all it seems we’ve completely missed the whole point to the foundations of everything love, life/death, and humanity.
Our new sins seem to be politics, money, stereotypes, ignorance, passivity and justified hate. We seem to live for excuses than visions; we seem to love everything else except love itself. We confuse lots of things like education and wisdom, vengeance and justice, value and money, love and oppression, love and addition…
 
I’ve had the privilege to participate in the biggest book fair event in Ethiopia. Almost all prominent bookstores, publishers, retail shops were presented. And it might seem fair to say this event was the mini version of the long lost Great Alexandrian Library where all the worlds’ wisdom can be found in one place. This place is the birthplace of civilization. But it couldn’t be further from the truth, It seems even after going through 15 years of fact-checking (school) we still have a hard time differentiating facts and opinions, even after all these years of learning it seems we were never thought rationality and still dwelled in the realm of emotionality. I can say 80% of the ‘adult’ content presented was pornography but not the like the ones we were used to, not the like that poisons the body’s divinity but rather that of the heart’s/minds’. This type of pornography is not depicted through naked imageries but rather hateful words. Political Porn is everywhere and it seems to be the new sin. People feed on their love for hate which seems to lead us to oblivion, and put on more dirt on the long dead and buried childhood dreams. These books (wicked knowledge) got us searching smokes filled with emptiness. Vengeance prevails in Justice’s clothing. As soon as we wake up we pray for our daily dose of fear, grab some anger on our way to the so-called “work”, which is dead just as the feeling it creates when said. We pump ourselves the whole day with justified hatred; we spend our evenings cutting stems while sitting on the tree’s branches. We hate ourselves so much we pray for our misfortune, our deterioration. We secretly wish for everyone else’s agony just so that our darkness feels less dark. And we glorify great men as gods just so we can stay worthless. We destroy in the names of those who built, we spread ignorance in the names of those who have brought enlightenment, we hate in the name of love, we hate wise men in the name of another wise man, and we kill in the names of those who’ve saved.
You think your love yourself? Well you don’t. How can you claim to love yourself while you’re craving for hate and violence, how can you claim to love yourself while your addicted to negativity, how can what you call love is the left over from your body’s animalistic survival instinct. It’s been ages since your mind killed your soul and has committed suicide. We are the zombies; we are the zombies our grandparents foreseen in their future, our present. We are multilingual but can barely communicate, we, the doctors, prevent death but barely heal, we, engineers, build walls but rarely bridges, we, leaders, are in the front but in the route going to straight to hell, we, the preachers, we are the false Christ, we the teachers handout fishes but rarely the wisdom of catching it (I wonder if we can even fish in the begging). We are the walking dead.
We are our kid’s parasites; we give birth to them just so we can feed on the corps of their future. We slaughter their dreams just to listen to their screams. We hand them snakes in beautifully rapped gift boxes. We talk about how pure our country is while we are the kid that defiled his own mother. WE chopped our existence, our wholeness, our divinity in to tiny abstraction boxes and identified ourselves by our private parts, by our delusions, by our idols, by our desires… We treat the other sex as a pray or a monster. We treat the other faith that preaches love as an enemy. We treat the other person with a different pigmentation, name as not worthy of becoming a human. We treat other sinners as the devil’s advocate just because they sin differently.