Thats from Confessions by Saint Augustine. What is your take? Can someone who is incapible of understanding sin, such as a baby or even a metally retarded person, sin? If they have no knowalge that what they do is wrong be punished for wrong doing?

No, there's nothing wrong with murder committed by an insane person.

I'm looking at this from a religous standpoint, and more specificly a Christian one, for that is what Saint Augestine was primaily concerned with.

Is there something wrong about killing someone if you don't know it to be wrong? Yes. Should it be held in the same light, no. I don't really think that the food correlation was quite on because the only way a baby can tell you that it's hungry is by crying, since they can't speak intelligently and can't make something themselves.

Before a baby understands good and evil, they are like Adam and Eve before the fall. It is only once they reach the age where they understand right and wrong, as Adam and Eve did after eating the fruit, that they are capable of sin. At least, those are my thoughts on the subject.

I would say that too, but what about a metally incompetant person? They have the same understanding of "right and wrong" as a baby could. So, can they sin?

I was afraid someone might bring that up.

Frankly, I don't know.

Well as I understand it, the Catholic approach to sin is that "sinfulness" is not synonymous with "unethicality." In other words, sinfulness is not determined on what sins one does. Sin is not mere act, but rather it is a condition that humans are born into--hence the idea of "original sin."

We are sinners by birth, not by act (although this is how our sinfulness is expressed).

In this sense, then yes, even babies and mentally incompetent are sinners. However, this terminology is misleading (sinnER implies act). Catholics would probably say that they are not free of sin.

I personally, however, do not like the connotations of "sin" as they have developed today (contrasted with the etymology, which indicates "missing the mark" as Boru has said elsewhere). It will be a while, however, before I have developed my own substantial thoughts on sin...

Well, if we are born with sin, doesn't the baptisim wash away the sin that we are "given" through being human? From then on isn't it through acts that we aquire sin to ourselves, sort to speak.

If you are a Christian, then you ought agree that everyone sins, including children.

Well, I'm not and I don't.

But to sin (the action), I would imagne you would have to know what sin is, which a baby or one who is metally incompetant cannot do.

Again, at least in the Catholic sense, "sinfulness" is not just about intent and act, but partially a state of being and partially something we inherit from the fall of Adam.

Baptism washes away our sin in the sense that we are no longer held accountable for sinfulness, not necessarily to permanently clean us from sin until we consciously commit a sinful act.

If babies were not sinful then they wouldn't need to be baptized in the first place.