The following is a discussion of the Christian views on the sin nature. This was occasioned by an earnest question:

How is sentencing someone to eternal Hell whether they committed a misdemeanor or a felony just? How can you have the same punishment no matter what the crime (sin)? That's like sending someone to the gas chamber for "stealing" a penny from someone's piggy bank.

This question is worth discussing, because it highlights what Christian doctrine actually teaches, against what popular opinion sometimes misrepresents.

The Christian God is absolutely holy, and will allow no sin at all. God can't sin. God doesn't want us to sin. If we are to be with him, we must be sinless as he is. God's standard is absolute perfection. He made the universe, and we have to abide by his rules. Remember also that the Christian God is both loving and just: he does not have the mushy, no-accountability love of Hinduism; nor does he have the perfect justice with no love of the Allah of Islam.

If it is possible for someone to steal a penny, then it is possible to steal a dollar. Or a million. Or be the next CEO doing a perp walk in front of the media cameras. The sin nature is not a matter of degree in what someone does or doesn't do. The sin nature is either present or absent. People either have a sin nature or they do not. Having a sin nature is something people are born with, not the result of something they do or do not do. If it is potentially possible to steal a penny, then it's possible to murder. Some sins are worse than others in terms of their consequences, but the tendency to sin, the sin nature, is present in every person.

To be with God in heaven, we must have no sin nature. Heaven is holy. If it was possible to sin (whether anyone actually sinned or not), then heaven would not be heaven, the dwelling place of the absolutely holy God. To be with God, forever, we must be as holy as God is.

Being right with God is not a matter of keeping the rules. Both Christians and others miss this, with the emphasis on the Ten Commandments and the rather legalistic doctrines of some Christian groups. People often feel that they are not sinful if they keep the rules, and they could go to God and say they were good because they did not murder or commit some other heinous sin. Keeping or not keeping rules is not the issue. Paul's argument in Romans 7 and 8 is expressly that no one can keep all the rules, because of the taint of sin. The real issue is sin's taint. People can't always do the right thing even when they purpose to. (I have several cases of this here, in about the middle of this article.)

How do we get out of this mess? For a person to be right with God, that person has to be without a sin nature. But because human depravity is pervasive (i.e. the doctrine of total depravity), you can't be without the sin nature. We're hopeless. Therefore we need a substitute, someone without the sin nature who took our place. Through God's grace, Jesus Christ was allowed to take the punishment for every person as a substitute. Our way out is through Jesus.

The question of what evil actually is (and by extension sin), and why it exists, has preoccupied theologians and philosophers from the beginning. I can't do this topic justice. It would require bookshelves to even discuss, let alone draw conclusions about. The predominant view is that evil is an absence of something. When people choose to say no to God and live on their own, they remove God's presence from their lives, and the vacuum that results is what we experience as evil.

Additional note: Protestants (like myself) consider the Catholic view on sin to be an incorrect interpretation of the Bible. Catholics distinguish between mortal (unforgivable) and venal (forgivable) sins. Catholics teach that once a person has had the sin nature forgiven by Jesus, the person is still able to commit sins while on earth. During this time, if a venal sin is committed by a Catholic, the sin can be forgiven if the sin is confessed (not to Jesus, but to the Church acting on his behalf); if these sins are not confessed, they must be purged by fire in purgatory. Mortal sins are not forgivable, and result in damnation. The distinction between venal and mortal sins is not in the Bible, nor is the doctrine of purgatory (in the Protestant Bible, although even the verses cited in the Catholic Bible are questionable as to how they establish the full doctrine).