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Tonight I watched the movie Kite Runner. It is a fantastic piece of film making, storytelling, and heart wrenching about a boy of privilege that flees with his father when the Soviets invade. More importantly though, it is a story of morality and the value of life and living for now.

At one point, the boy tells his father that the Mullahs say he will be judged at his death for drinking. That it is a sin. His father responds with the very essence of our existence but an essence beyond the obvious meaning of the words…

“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft… When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”

The obvious truth in that statement is that all sin truly is about theft, but it also points to a deeper truth and that is when someone dies the impact is not upon the dead person, but only upon the living left behind that grieve over the death and that the other sins of theft are all about our perceptions of having, holding, and loss. The core of the current “spiritual norm” is that all sin is based upon what we lose as a result of the person’s sinning, but when you really shine a light upon it its about our perceived loss..that isn’t real.

There is no sin if we don’t perceive the loss and our existence as separate selves isn’t real, so sin isn’t either. How can we perceive loss if our self can’t truly lose?