Rationalization of Sin: Who is Your Container?

water, baptism, purity

water, baptism, purity

The famous psychologist, Leon Festinger, proposed his Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, to explain how individuals rationalize their way away from discomfort to comfort, from inconsistency to consistency and, ultimately, from an external to an internal locus of control. A more simplified, if not utterly simplistic, way of seeing this dynamic is what I would like to call the Container Reversal.

Sin as The Wrong Fork in Dissonance Boulevard

Festinger proposed that when people are faced with a conflict between what they perceive to be truth and reality and their own condition or actions, they will invariably re-define that truth and reality to relieve that conflict. In the context of sin, the sinner, faced with the choice between admitting and seeking to erase his sin or simply pretending that his sin is no longer sin, will more often than not choose the latter as the easier route to solving his problem.

Since we are children of God, we are endowed with an innate sense of what pleases God and what offends Him. In this context, one can understand that we likewise will have an innate sense of any distance between what we know pleases God and what we ought to know displeases God. That distance is moral dissonance, and its relative size is the perceived magnitude of one’s sin. Viewing Festinger in the context of sin, then, we see that there are three main possible responses to that gap.

First, we may simply detest that distance and run back to God, profoundly unable to feel any distance from His loving embrace. At the other extreme, we may be totally oblivious to that distance, so steeped in ourselves as to care little for that distance. In between these two extremes, however, we may struggle with that distance, our ultimate move more often than not dictated by the relative weight of our pride in comparison to our love of God.

Those who love God so much as to abandon their pride and seek redemption can only do so by looking at reality and truth square in the eye, with no rationalizations or pretenses. That is the foundation of confession, for forgiveness cannot exist unless one has truly faced the truth of one’s sinfulness.

Those too steeped in pride out of self-love to love God enough to admit their wrong and empty themselves to His mercy will then, as predicted by Festinger’s theory, shift their reality, their truth, to appease their stubborn self-absorption.

Sin as Delusional Comfort

Ultimately, sin cannot exist for long unless one has, at some level, excavated a comfort zone amid the ruins of one’s moral state. When sin becomes comfortable, one has successfully found the rationalization for that sin. To be comfortable in sin is to have profoundly internalized the denial of that sin as sin, perhaps even under the guise of some twisted nobility such as being open-minded, non-judgmental, tolerant, or even progressive.

At the root of this twisted nobility, however, is a load of self-interested, preventive delusion. Thus, those who proclaim that they do not judge others are really saying that they do not want to be judged themselves, so that they will therefore be free to carve their moral code as they go.

Sin as an Insecure Locus of Control

In psychology, locus of control is the relative perception of where one’s control over one’s environment lies. An external locus of control means that I feel like a boat adrift at sea, victim to the changing and uncontrollable winds of the world around me. An internal locus of control, on the other hand, implies that I recognize and embrace my ultimate control and, ultimately, my responsibility for my actions and my condition.

The paradox here is that one’s eternal salvation may well depend upon realizing that one has the internal locus of control to surrender one’s locus of control to God’s external locus of control. In other words, God has given us the free will to surrender all that we are and will be to God’s hands.

Given this internal locus of control by God, many cling to their power and refuse to then offer it back to God in total faith, trust, love and obedience. The seeds of all sinfulness lie in our relative delusion that we can guide our vessel anywhere near salvation on our own. Like a toddler at the helm of a yacht, we foolishly grasp the wheel in a pathetic attempt to save our souls on our terms.

Adam became the first to rationalize sin the moment he blamed Eve for his transgression, as if Eve had forced him to sin. Eve did the same when she blamed the serpent. Imagine blaming money for being so helpful, school for being so difficult, and one’s foe for being so annoying, as justification for theft, cheating, and murder and you will get a sense of how lame this rationalization really is.

It is only when we admit that we are driving toward the abyss that we will be able to give God the wheel.

Sin as the Container Reversal

All of the above takes us to the dynamic I call the Container Reversal. God created us to be the liquid within His container of love, easily adapting ourselves to His Will and Purpose for our lives. As we allow ourselves to be increasingly stained by sin, we feel a disconnect which we seek to minimize and appease through rationalization. This rationalization eventually strangles the warmth of God’s love for us and eventually freezes us in self-obsession and absorption to the point where we no longer adapt, or fit, in God’s container of love.

As that ice increases, it eventually overtakes and encloses the container converting us into the container wherein our counterfeit god must adapt to our rationalizations.

Conclusion

Everything comes full circle, then, when we realize that sin can only exist in the cold, which results when we block out the warmth of God’s love. Beyond that, sin is the delusion of comfort and the insecure refusal to place God as our locus of control.

We were created in God’s image, and were meant to shape our minds, hearts, and souls to God’s container of love. It is only when we refuse to let God be that container, and pretend that God must adapt to our container instead, that sin truly takes root in our lives.

As often as you are able, ask yourself “Who is my container?” and, if you are sincerely honest, you will know where you stand with God.

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7 thoughts on “Rationalization of Sin: Who is Your Container?”

  1. “Adam became the first to rationalize sin the moment he blamed Eve for his transgression, as if Eve had forced him to sin. Eve did the same when she blamed the serpent. ”

    And God (blamed) and cursed the serpent when he forever condemned him to crawl on his
    belly and wait for someone to crush its head.

    1. The difference being that Adam blamed Eve for doing a wrong he could have and should have taken responsibility to avoid, and Eve blamed the serpent for pushing her to do a wrong that she could have and should have taken responsibility to avoid. The question remains, did God blame the serpent for a wrong God could have and should have taken the responsibility to avoid? Obviously not, so the analogy or inference that God did the same as Adam and Eve falls as flat as the serpent’s belly.

    2. Adam and Eve is the Judaic creation myth…one should not read too much into myths. Always remember that a text without a context is a pretext for having it say what you want….every religion and culture has its own creation myth….but a myth is still a myth, as was the genocide of the Canaanites, etc

    3. We work with what is available. GG’s rational is OK but God is a player in this
      and did exact an immediate revenge for what was done to his creatures just as
      he exacted a penalty for the actions of the former.

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