‘Everybody knows, then, that “sin” basically means “indulgence” or “enjoyable naughtiness.” If you were worried, you’d use a different word or phrase. You’d talk about “eating disorders” or “addictions”; you’d go to another vocabulary cloud altogether. The result is that when you come across someone trying to use “sin” in its old sense, you may know perfectly well in theory that they must mean something which isn’t principally chocolately, and yet the modern mood music of the word is so insistent that it’s hard to hear anything else except an invocation of a trivially naughty pleasure. And if someone talks, gravely and earnestly, about what a sorrowful burden one of these is, the result will be to make that speaker seem swiftly much, much more alarming than the thing they’ve got worked up about. For which would seem to you to be the biggest problem, the biggest threat to human happiness: a plate or pralines, or a killjoy religious fanatic denouncing them?’
Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, p.26.
