Certainty

There is one thing about which I hold myself certain. One thing I consider inviolable truth. It is that certainty is poison to the human spirit. The more certain you are of something the less human you become. Witness fundamentalism everywhere.

If you are certain of something then that is something that you must do your utmost to inject doubt into. Examine under the light of many worlds, consider it as the ancient Persian would both drunk and sober, include as many more altered states as your lifestyle allows, consider whether you would believe the same if your moral basis were built upon something else. Perform experiments, physical or social as necessary, to test your understanding and the veracity of your certainty and keep notes. Make it impossible for yourself to ignore the edges of your certainty where logic or fact tells you otherwise. Because once you refuse to allow yourself to see one small facet of reality you begin to blind yourself to all of it. And thence, by all measures of psychiatry, lies madness.

I have yet to find evidence that certainty in any thing does more good than harm. However while there are truths that lack contrary evidence there are no truths that merit certainty. I accept even my initial statement in this post as a poison, it poisons my ability to make statements unambiguously and it poisons my ability to trust in the things that people say. Frankly, that may be a good thing in some cases. I accept that one poison regardless but no further. No other certainty will I knowingly accept into my self.

Sin

Something JD just mentioned on KLOVE struck a chord.
Roughly quoted, if you've strayed so far off the path and you're thinking you can't walk all the way back, you don't have to. All you have to do is turn around.

To God, the tiniest little sin is the same as the lifetime of sin of a serial rapist. But Jesus has already paid for it all. You're not racking up a debt; you don't have a sin credit card that you have to pay off. There's no bill due at the end of the day. Jesus has already paid for it all. You just have to trust Him.

God has no shades of grey, it is either a sin or it is God's own truth. Humans introduce shades of grey, and we try to dispense punishments commensurate to the crime. But the difference betwen crime and sin is more than mere semantics. Crime is a human thing, a piece of the world that is a symptom of its brokenness. You can sin and commit no human crime, and vice versa. A judge tallys up your crimes and punishes you with a sentence he or she deems suitable to the transgression. Jesus paid for all your sin, past present and future, 2000 years ago in a single stroke and opened your way to heaven. All you have to do is take His hand and trust Him.