TEMPTATION
Jews and Christians make a big deal out avoiding temptations to moral sins because scripture has much to say about sins like sex, greed, pride. have difficulty believing that they can be guilty of tempting people to sin. Every time someone converts to Judaism or Christianity, those converts have fallen into the temptation to sin by becoming religious. In these conversions, Judaism and Christianity fulfill the function of Canaanites who want to expand their kingdoms by absorbing others into their kingdoms. The dynamics of this conflict are explained further in Sibling Conflict, Religion is the Enemy, and Gods at War.

Except for understanding that religion is sin, it is hard to imagine that anyone can make us sin. This may be true for worldly sins like murder, theft and adultery, but, when it come to religion, we see that whenever religion is taught, modeled and encouraged, people are tempted to sin.

Hard as it may be to accept, the Bible actually tells us that religion makes us sin, follow other gods and commit harlotry. We can understand and accept this, of course, only when we understand the following:

Still, it is hard to accept that religion actually makes us sin. We like to think that we have the wisdom to know what sin is and that we have the moral will to choose to avoid it. That self-righteous thinking might apply to some kinds of moral sins (e.g. murder, stealing, coveting, lying, etc.) but it does not apply to the sin of religion which most of us learn and adopt from childhood.

As children, we do not have the discernment to know that religion is sin. If our parents practice religion, and if we see many others doing it, we learn to accept religion as a normal part of life and choose to participate in it so that we can be accepted by our parents and other religious people.

Because religion seems so right and so good, it does not cross our minds as children or adults to reject it. This is how the sins of the father are passed on to the children. But, even if we had the insight to reject our parent’s religion, our parents and their religious friends would oppress and afflict us as necessary to ensure that we continue to practice their religion. This is how religion uses oppression to ensure that it survives from generation to generation.

This common history traces the toxic effect of religion in all cultures in all generations. It also testifies to the fact that Religion is a Stronghold of Wrong Thinking. But the good news is that, in these modern times, God is calling people out of religion at a rate that, as far as we know, is unparalleled in history.

Parental religious influence is represented in the Bible as “passing children through the fire” and as offering them to the god Molech. The practice of teaching children to be religious by listening to false prophets is the reason God punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generations. This may seem to be a harsh, unfair judgment until we recognize that children who were once victims of the sin of their parents later become perpetrators of the same sin when they teach their children to sin. It is an ongoing cycle of Old/First Covenant religion and it is not arrested until people do the following: