Today at Times And Seasons I went back to Grossman’s On Killing for a second post. This time I used his model of wartime atrocity as a vehicle for exploring sin. The short version? Acts we consider sinful are generally committed under some degree of mitigating circumstance, such as partial coercion and ignorance, and so in a sense are less important than our reaction to our own behavior after the fact. It’s at that time that we choose to either protect the ego by rationalizing our bad decision–and thus fully internalizing the implicit immorality of the action–or “lose ourselves” and sacrifice the ego in order to reject sin.
For the most part, we choose the former, unfortunately, and in so doing construct our own individualized Hells.
Edit: Nate pointed out that I left off the link the first time around. Oops! Here it is.
We need a link!