Here is the thing about sin: it is error, plain and simple. It is taking a wrong turn to get to the grocery store, or accidentally over-salting your chili. It is contrary to your own best interest, and thus not something, properly understood, that you should ever need to be punished for. Punishment is for maintaining social peace and harmony. It is an outer form.
Inner punishment has no use. There is never any point in beating yourself up. The task is to LEARN, and having learned, the sin evaporates. You take the correct route to the grocery store. You make superlative chili.
This is why there is no point in judging people–or yourself, for that matter. Life is filled with “tasks at hand”, and our job is to do them as well as we can, and when we screw up, to learn, and do better. You, and everyone you meet, is a work in progress. If you want to do good, set a good example. Teach. As the Tao Te Ching says, a good man is a bad man’s teacher and a bad man is a good man’s pupil. Everything is relative.
Even the most twisted sadists, if you penetrate to their cores, are broken children, filled with horror, self disgust, and the most terrible emotional pain. Their paths are very, very long ones, but all end in the light, in my view.
But this is all speculation. I need to go to my task at hand, which is a session of Kum Nye.