Three Centuries of Morality - Sundays with John Ball

Do we repent of our sin or of our sins?
It depends on whether your religion is a faith or whether it is a rule book.

In Arabia there is a Moslem sect called the Wahhabis. It’s values of  life denial are spread throughout the world by the dictatorial government of Saudi Arabia. Many Moslems scarcely recognize it as being Islam at all.
A change of emphasis has come about in Islam. It is changing from a religion of understanding into a religion of morality. It is a result of societies moving away from power structures such as family and tribe, to power structures that revolve around the army and the state.
The collapse of the religion of understanding and the rise of the religion of morality coincides with a century of fascist regimes in the Moslem world, both secular and pseudo religious.
Moralistic religion is censorious by nature and it loves to punish. Its adherents are unhappy people who hate. Morality is an ideology that knows not love nor freedom. It is a cult of death, no religion at all.
 
Wahhabi Islam, which originally emerged in the eighteenth century, is closely related to the morality of Europe, the Nihilistic morality that led to the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, people who threw away the old religion and embraced the death cult of reward and punisment.
The Bolsheviks abolished the Russian Church to justify the morality of their crimes.
The Nazis were the products of the Prussian  bureaucracy that had abolished the Lutheran and Reformed faiths and substituted them with Pietist morality.

A moral person, a person who repents of their sins, rather than their sin, is self absorbed, forever examining themselves, disguising crime as morality, turning away from the reality of others, isolating themselves from their fellows and turning their face ever inwards.A moral person, a person who repents of their sins, rather than their sin, is self absorbed, forever examining themselves, disguising crime as morality, turning away from the reality of others, isolating themselves from their fellows and turning their face ever inwards.

The Hasidic movement in Judaism was a similar reaction to the increasingly authoritarian nature of eighteenth century society. Such self absorbed mysticism would have been unfeasible in an age of mutual dependency and communal land distribution.
In eighteenth century Britain there was similar hypocrisy and self absorption with the Methodists, the first Christian group outside the Roman Church to officially believe in Free Will, whose preoccupation was personal morality, this in a time of enclosures, new property rights, the destruction of ancient communities and the pauperization of ordinary people.

As authoritarian structures conquer, as capitalism spreads, as the state encroaches ever more, faith is replaced by a rule book, awareness of our innate sin is replaced by the monitoring of our personal sins, righteousness is replaced by morality, virtue by crime.