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Last week I wrote about the conflict between a basic axiom of human behavior (we tend to see ourselves as heroes in our own stories and rationalize our behavior accordingly) and the requirement that sinful actions be in some sense deliberate in order to be sinful. I did this primarily by suggesting that, while the original commission of a sinful act often occurs under duress of some sort (thus mitigating against it’s nature as a deliberate choice), we frequently compound that sin by subsequently trying to rationalize it. I’d like to conclude (for now, anyway) my posts on this subject by looking the other direction: backwards in time. One response to my original argument may simply be to deny the premise that people don’t view their sinful actions as sinful at the time that they commit them. In one sense, this must be true. We aren’t held responsible for violations of moral laws we are really and truly ignorant of. But it’s a mistake to see this issue in terms of stark binary opposites, as though the only options available are “know” and “not know.” Let me suggest two realistic descriptions of the frame of mind of a person at the time that they commit a sin: They simply are not deliberating at all. This describes the mental states of, say, someone with an extremely quick fuse. Such a person can go from passive to enraged (in the right situation) without ever…