Life is a test and I got bad marks, Now some saint got the job of writing down my sins.

The word “sin” is derived from a Greek word that we don’t have in English, it’s an archery term which means “to aim for a target, but miss.” Obviously, “sin” isn’t the word Jesus or Abraham used, they spoke Aramaic, but the New Testament was first written in Greek. Plato, of Athens, read this term in the Bible and interpreted it to mean, just as no archer misses the target deliberately, man doesn’t sin willingly. I think this is quite a righteous idea, but not clear-cut. Plato is wiser than I could ever aspire to be but I think he was being too naïve. Years later, Augustine, a great thinker from Hippo, Africa, said quite the opposite. Augustine was known as a Plutonic and was the first to integrate Christian and Plutonic beliefs, but Augustine didn’t see eye to eye with Plato on this matter. Augustine said that man sinned, simply, because it felt good. Man has a perverse relationship with sin. He recalled a story from when he was a boy: In his neighbor’s yard, there was an enormous pear tree, his neighbors would pick and sell the pairs and use the money as their primary source of income. Augustine recalls that the pears were green and he wasn’t very hungry but even if he was, he actually didn’t like pears, but he stole one anyway. Knowing that the act was “wrong,” Augustine said man sinned, simply for the veneration of sin.