“Being who you are is never a sin.”
–Maxim 7
This is, I hope, self-explanatory. I suppose different people can take different things from it according to their own perspective and experience. I will reflect on it from my own perspective and experience.
People are all different. We’re different in different ways. Some of us are introverts, preferring to keep our time with other people to a minimum, and some are extraverts, thriving on the company of others. Some of us are born artists, or born dreamers, born analysts, even, it would seem, born bureaucrats. Some of us are attracted to people of particular sex or gender, the same as our own or different, and for some that matters little, if anything.
Some of us like playing games of chance, skill or strategy, and others find such things a worthless pursuit. Some of us are only comfortable with intimate relationships being strictly between one person and another, while others find they cannot restrict their love in that way. Some of us find our gender identity conforms with that presumed from our anatomy, and some don’t; either way, some of us are comfortable conforming with some, even all, of society’s expectations of expressing that gender, while others are happy conforming to few, if any.
Some of us wish to shout our faith from the rooftops, and others consider their religion a private matter. Some are outspoken in their political beliefs, others prefer to keep them private, and others do not feel able to engage in the political process at all.
Now, not only is it no sin – no transgression, nor any other word you might choose – to be that way, it is further not wrong to express it, to live your life that way, providing you do so in a way that does not cause harm, that does not violate consent, that does not intrude on others unduly. I do not say “does not intrude on others” as an absolute, because there will always be people who see things differently and see your expression of your self as an intrusion, but some limits should be respected.
There are some ‘ways that people are’ that cannot be properly expressed without going beyond limits, some that would transgress very important, absolute limits. In such cases, expressing it may be wrong. But simply being it, that is not wrong. You are never wrong simply for being who you are – only ever in how you act, and only when how you act violates the limits of, for want of a better term, civilised society.
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