All significant sin is a conscious decision to sin, contrary to satan's attempt to frame people into their sins. This means that sin is defined by intentions, not results.

One person alone could never decide to sin, knowing that it would put him in conflict with everyone else. But seeing a large group of other persons sinning, many of them encouraging the sin and supposedly gaining from it, a sense of security is established for sin. These conditions allow people to consciously decide to sin. In fact, the feeling of security with sin often emboldens corrupt persons to defy their opponents.

In spite of the illusive security, each sin separates the perpetrator from the universe. "The universe" means all other persons, even if they are corrupt but not collaborating, in addition to the truth and justice which the universe produces.

But when sin is perpetrated, the negative effects seem distant and weak, while the immediate effects seem to be much more significant. So the truth and justice and concerns of other persons are defied in perpetrating the sin.

While sin destroys a person's relationship to the universe, it shifts purposes to oneself (and one's own groups) creating selfishness. The selfishness shows up through all of the rationalizing that goes with sin.

In other words, if a corrupt person says one and one equals two, he says it for himself, not for someone else. Believers have a parable for this effect. Christ tells a corrupt and uncorrupt person to carry a stone. The corrupt person picks up a small one, and the uncorrupt person picks up a normal one. Then Christ says the stone will be a measure of their rewards in heaven. Later he says the same thing again. The corrupt person picks up a large stone, and the uncorrupt person again picks up a normal one. Christ asks, for whom were you carrying the stone?

Where the selfishness shows up in real life is in restricting the activities of corrupt persons preventing them from doing anything which would benefit others besides themselves and their own group. (Since the most corrupt persons conspire in the spirit world, they do everything as a group.) Corrupters are very restricted in producing truth and knowledge, because these effects benefit everyone. Corrupters are highly inclined to produce fraud for this reason.

Similarly, selfishness is a motive for not relating one reality to another. Linking realities together unifies them and universalizes results, which means everyone benefits. Instead, the scope of any subject corrupters take up is narrowly defined by the motive of selfishness. This narrowness is portrayed as a virtue, almost like minding one's own business. But it is pure sin, because only context defines realities properly, and corruption of context is the primary means of railroading fraud onto people. Also, diversity of realities is necessary to clarify and develop truth. It's like binary vision. Looking at a subject from two or more angles greatly clarifies it. Parallels with related subjects show similarities and patterns.

Life requires unified reality and universalized standards. Selfishness destroys the universality necessary for life.