The Only Unavoidable Sins

Supposedly grateful enough for the redemption extended to them that they are willing to change their lives, plenty of Christians, or at least people casually identifying as Christians with no deep philosophical awareness of what Christianity is or how it relates to other concepts, will do either nothing to avoid certain sins, will defend them, or will trivialize them (not in the sense of recognizing they are objectively lesser than other sins, but in the sense of not taking them seriously).  When they do happen to selectively have genuine interest in moral ideas, it is almost always broad cultural norms rather than Biblical obligations or church legalism that drives them to think that innocent or good things are sinful (Deuteronomy 4:2).

There are people who think Christian morality actually condemns things like use of profanity, nudity, anger, or masturbation, still engaging in such things even as they condemn them on the basis of feelings or traditions.  The problem here is not that they do these things, but that they are stupid enough to think they are Biblically immoral (they plainly are not condemned and thus pretending otherwise is itself the moral, and intellectual, error) and that they are stupid enough to apathetically or defensively pursue them.  It is one thing to sometimes succumb to sin without thinking one must have still been in the right to do so.  Regret and moral improvement are likely to follow if this is someone's intentions.

It is another thing to think that something immoral, whatever it might be, is ever obligatory, good, or justifiable.  It is also another thing to think that any particular sin is unavoidable no matter how much everyone strives to abstain from it, or that moral philosophy is not something important enough to dwell on more than matters of mere practicality.  If one observes and converses with the typical evangelical, one of these latter three stances is almost invariably what they base their lives around.  Sin is regarded, of course most often when it benefits someone personally, as an absolutely unavoidable thing that there is no point in fighting or loathing.

Not everyone struggles with or has any interest in entire categories of sins.  What is alluring to one person might be something another person is not captivated by, and it is always possible for someone who partly wants to engage in a specific sin to resist.  Moral perfection, either way, is absolutely achievable for everyone, for something it is impossible for one to do would not be sinful to fall short of, for they cannot have failed in an obligation.  There is no individual sin, class of sins, or situation where it is logically impossible for someone to have acted differently and averted the entire circumstance at hand, including by rejecting all irrationalistic, immoral motivations of any kind.

There is, though, an extremely small set of scenarios where, if a situation was not thwarted beforehand, a person will legitimately be unable to avoid sin by action or inaction.  This can only come about if all people involved did not align with reason and morality enough previously to avoid this fate.  Among these very precise, rare, but still logically possible situations would be the likes of Jephthah's dilemma in Judges 11, where he made an vow to God that he would sacrifice whatever walks through his doors to Yahweh.  His daughter is comes out from behind his doorway.  Breaking a promise to God and human sacrifice are both grave sins, and Jephthah could not avoid both sins at once.

It is not even that the scenarios themselves cannot have been avoided: once a person is already in them by philosophical negligence, apathy, emotionalism, or any other kind of irrationality.  The lesser sin is of course the one any person should enact in this case, not because the thing is itself obligatory, but because, through action or inaction respectively, it would be an even greater sin to make the other choice.  Jephthah should have broken a very careless vow rather than commit a capital sin involving murder, and a murder that echoes pagan human sacrifices at that.  Other than in instances like this, however, there are no sins or philosophical errors at all that are inevitable.  Even then, the only unavoidable sins are ones unavoidable because someone put themselves in a terrible circumstance through decisions that themselves could have been made differently.