One of the fundamentals I’ve learned in a hobby study of moral philosophy (unaccredited. I just read stuff and watch videos.) is the English language is not great for talking about wrongdoing.

We have the words sin and crime

Sin is a wrongdoing against God or against the divine, as asserted by organized religious ministries, who often do not agree. (Here in the States, some churches assert that gay sexual behavior is a sin, whereas others assert that judging others for being gay is a sin.) None of this is true. As Pope Frances observed, Only God knows the mind or intent of God, and Protestant faiths operate by the doctrines Sola Fide (By faith alone) and Sola Scriptura (By scripture alone) does one find salvation. Your favorite minister can only advise with opinions, and often they do to serve their own agenda. You and you alone get to decide what parts of the bible are valid in your life in the 2020s, and which parts are allegory, which parts are out of date (e.g. slavery, genocide, human sacrifice) and whether God will understand you’re doing your best in the circumstances He threw at you.

Crime is an offense against the state, which is, in turn, the organization that defines and enforces state law and is supposed to provide governance, often typically serving only the plutocrats and oligarchs that define what kinds of policy will be enacted. The state is not the community or the land, hence we see routine pushes to roll back environmental protections so that the community has clean air and drinking water, instead allowing industry to dump its soot and pig farmers to let their poop lagoons leak and poison the water table.

As a younger adult, seeing the CIA extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation program kidnap people and torture them, including innocent Americans, without judicial review or due process was one of my first steps into realizing the illegitimacy of the United States. None of that served the people of the US (we have much more effective non-pain-driven ways to interrogate POWs. Torture only happened because rich people wanted brown people to suffer). Since then we’ve seen our own rights stripped away peacemeal, and noticed a disparity in how the rule of law applies to those with wealth, and those without. So the state is very much an entity other than the public or our society.

Neither sin nor crime reflect wrongdoing against the self, the community, the society or the commonwealth, and English doesn’t have names for such wrongdoing. We have to modify sin and crime such as crime against humanity or sin against nature

And this, then leads to what we imagine sin and crime to be, mostly wonton (unlicensed) sex, bank robbery and serial killing. Our songs of sin and remorse talk about killing neighbors or fucking neighbors. They don’t talk about war profiteering, or pushing addictive pharmaceuticals, or capturing the government of the people, or actively obfuscating the effects of mass fossil-fuel use on the ecology, collapsing the ecology, extinguishing biodiversity and possibly the human species. Elite deviance (e.g. white collar crime) causes more death, more destruction and more cost than all the petty sins and crimes _by multiple orders of magnitude) and yet God (God’s alleged voice) has nothing to say about them, and the state says very little, while it’s instead looking to abolish drag queens reading to children at the library.

So not only is there no sin, but sin and crime are irrelevant, except for those things that are enforced by law enforcement institutions that mostly want to rob citizens and / or shoot them. But this is to say you will be hunted for self publishing your music or whistleblowing a company for balking safety regulations as you will robbing a bank.

So not only are we truly free from moral obligations, but we might actually be ethically bound to consider for ourselves what we opine is right and wrong. When religious ministries are asserting violence against gays, Palestinians and immigrants is right and proper, obedience to divine command theory is no longer safe or right.