Jesus implies that sin causes death in verses like John 8:21 and by saying that his commandments (directed against sin) give life. Can we trace where the sin goes and at what point it causes death?

Consumerism

Consumer sin often follows the path of money. If you trace where the money goes, then the sin seems to follow it. It is almost like a sin pipeline; buy at this end, death at the other. For example I will try to trace the sin of buying a 50p plastic torch from a hardware store. It doesn't sound very sinful does it? That is because you don't see the sin pipeline, only the product at the end.

The immediate sins are easy to identify. For example, you could have forgone buying that torch and instead given the 50p to charity or to a poor person. This would help to ease the suffering of people who are at the rough end of bearing the consequences of the sins of others. The hardware store is set up such that the cashiers are on the minimum wage (£8,000 a year), the shop manager earns £35,000 per year, the CEO of the company earns £300,000 a year and the shareholders just got a big dividend; you are supporting massive inequality. Additionally, the shop is very well lit and air conditioned and uses up a lot of energy, which burns oil, gas and coal in power stations. This causes a lot of pollution, as well as directly encouraging war through oil (discussed below).

17.5% of the money you spent on the torch is VAT (tax), which is absorbed into the government funds. Government spending is shown in the graph. The first thing to notice is that foreign aid isn't even listed; it is buried in the 'Other' slice of the pie. A large amount is swallowed up by pensions and other social support – this is fine, many of these people would otherwise be very poor in the current system (however, note that the amounts of money involved are much greater than the GDP of most African countries). Health takes £104bn a year and serves to demotivate people from following Jesus by providing an alternative approach to healing. Spiritual healing is better and free. Defense takes £32bn, so purchasing your torch helps to fund the war on terrorism (that is one way in which the torch causes death). Public order (police) takes up £33bn. This would be unnecessary in a Christian society. Education takes £77bn, which it is largely directed towards making students suited to our capitalist society. The emphasis is on maths, science and business. Religious education might occupy 30 minutes a week or less, and is completely ineffective in the way that it is taught. When I was at school, it was taught from an agnostic point of view; we learned that there are six major religions without determining if any were correct, and only looked at their ceremonies and practices. The government spending policies are very far from the Ideal Christian Society. Jesus told us to render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar's, but the taxation system itself is an ideology opposed to following Jesus. A follower is generally out of the taxation system anyway. With regards to government policy, the sin is at the level of the voter as well as the government. People tend to vote selfishly in their own interests. Voting for sin means that the government will carry it out on behalf of the voter.

Back to the torch. Where did it come from? It had to be delivered to the shop by long distance lorry from the distribution centre. The torch was delivered to the distribution centre from a sea port, because it had arrived from China by cargo vessel. The transport of this torch burned up some diesel fuel (oil). The torch was assembled in a factory in China which uses sweat shop workers. They are paid fractionally more than average, but they work twelve hours a day. The worker who assembled your torch is starting to get osteoarthritis in his hands because of the repetitive movements that he has to make. Some parts of the torch are made in different factories (for example, the light bulbs), and the parts are transported to the assembly plant. The assembly plant moulds the plastic itself. It buys plastic sheets from another factory, which uses oil to produce the plastic. China is growing quickly, and the demand for oil is increasing hugely. The Chinese government has never been influenced by Christian theology, and has low ethical standards. It buys its oil from wherever there is oil to be bought. It sources a lot of oil from Iran, which provides economic strength for a country that is developing nuclear weapons.

Therefore, buying a 50p torch has fed a capitalist sin pipeline which inevitably leads to suffering. The suffering caused by the purchase of one torch is microscopic, but a lot of torches builds up a lot of sin, and the result is suffering and death. Can we ever justify buying anything at all? Yes – if it is useful for following Jesus; by implication this includes the necessities of life, since we have to be alive and well before we can serve anybody else.

Clothing

Imagine that you walk into your local supermarket-owned clothes outlet and buy a T-shirt for £2.99 which you thought was a very good deal. The label says it is 75% cotton, 25% polyester and Made in Indonesia. The Jews considered wearing clothes made with mixed fibres to be a sin (Leviticus 19:19; it is safe to ignore this commandment by true standards). There is no sin in wearing this T-shirt. However, the money used to buy this T-shirt paid for it to be transported across the globe from the sweat shop that made it. The farmer that grew the cotton is dependent on an American pesticide company and he is in debt because he has to purchase these pesticides. 200,000 farmers commit suicide each year due to debts built up by pesticide companies (source: People Tree). Many commit suicide using the pesticides themselves (the World Health Organisation estimates that there are about 3 million cases of pesticide poisoning each year, resulting in about 250,000 deaths). Did you sin by buying this cheap T-shirt? If so, what was the sin? Perhaps it was greed, because you already had ten T-shirts in the drawer. But the fact is that the T-shirt was so cheap that you hardly noticed any change go out of your wallet. So whose is the sin? Did you notice the flashy advert on television for the store that you bought the T-shirt from? Did you know that the share price of that company had just jumped by ten points? In general, you do not sin by buying clothing, because it is an essential of life – there are better ways to buy it (e.g. fair trade shops) but for the poorest in society this would not be an option, and they would not have sinned by buying such a T-shirt if they needed it. The sin is caused by the greed of the shareholders and company managers who make the most money from selling you that T-shirt. Their sin of greed combined with the greed of those managing the pesticide companies causes death through suicide of cotton farmers. If possible, please obtain clothing from companies who stock fair trade cotton or from charity shops.

Big brand products

Many foods are responsible for poverty and suffering. For example, half of the world's cocoa beans are sourced from the Ivory Coast in Africa, which uses child slaves (source: BBC News 24). Put Nestle into a search engine and high up in the list is a page on boycotting Nestle because of their baby milk abuses. Put coke into a search engine and you will find www.killercoke.org. A recent episode of Dispatches (Channel 4) showed that Coca-Cola sources sugar from farms in South America that use child labour; this work is dangerous and involves machetes to cut the sugar cane. Sugar Cane could be associated with Cain, a farmer in the book of Genesis who killed his brother Abel. Perhaps the best way to make sure that food has not oppressed anyone is to obtain it from an organic/fair-trade food shop (although fair-trade is not perfect) and to avoid foods containing ingredients that may have caused oppression (e.g. sugar and cocoa).

Cars

These are one of the worst ways to spend money. They burn oil, cause pollution, cost a fortune to maintain, and the sins that are associated with them result in death in road traffic accidents and in oil-derived wars. They were manufactured using many different factories in different countries to build them, almost certainly using sweat shop workers. They are like the 50p torch on a large scale. In addition, they are heavily advertised and encourage greed by creating a range of different cars, some more expensive than others. They are seen as a status symbol and essential part of the 'getting laid' process (see the letter on Relationships) because women are generally more attracted to men with cars than men without. Cars act as a sin-multiplier, and almost everything associated with them is wrong (insurance, excessive tax, pollution etc). And what happens to them when they are disposed of? Where does all the toxic lead from the car battery go? If everything is taken into account, I wonder how much death, on average, is caused by the purchase and daily use of one car instead of giving that money to help the poor. My guess is a one-to-one ratio.

I have used the term 'sin-multiplier' to describe cars. A car increases the range and extent to which one person can sin. Society is biased towards people with cars because they are generally the people who have more money. For example, large out-of-town shopping centres are often hard for people to access if they do not own a car. The convenience of having a car can lead to increased consumerism, more exotic holidays and a busier Westernised lifestyle, much of which is at the expense of the poor.

Consumer electronics

I am writing this document on a computer, and I use the Internet to publish what I write. I can easily justify this by true standards. However, like cars, consumer electronics depreciate in value very rapidly, so you need to be spending a lot and constantly replacing them to keep up with the latest trends. Many electronic products are made in sweat shops, particularly the printed circuit boards.

Oil

Oil carries the mark of the beast. It is composed of carbon atoms which contain six protons, six electrons and six neutrons (666). It is used to fuel the economy of the industrialised nations. Oil is used for transport and plastic, and is found in virtually every consumer product. Most oil reserves are concentrated in the Middle Eastern countries. This means that the Western industrial economies are dependent on countries in an unstable region of the world. The American and British Governments recently fought a war and removed a dictatorship in Iraq that could have threatened their oil supply. Every time we buy something that has plastic in it, and every time we use electricity or transport, we are contributing to the overall sin.

Sin really does cause death. It may not be immediately obvious where the sin is, but carefully looking down a sin pipeline reveals what the sin is and where it causes suffering and death. We live in a globalised world, and the effect of sin in one country can lead to death on the other side of the planet.