From Austin Cline,
Your Guide to Agnosticism / Atheism.
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Western culture remains largely defined by Christianity and Christian doctrines, despite the great strides made in secularization and religious pluralism. Most Westerns continue to be brought up in environments that are at least nominally Christian and where life is framed with Christian ideas — among them being ideas about sin, salvation, and creation. Because of this, it is only to be expected that even very secular Westerns might continue to be influenced by Christian notions, even if unconsciously.

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and who have lost our faith have retained the Christian sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyzes us in action.
- Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), The Unquiet Grave (1945).

Cyril Connolly is concerned here very specifically with the influence that the doctrine of “sin” continues to exert on people. Even those who have lost their Christian faith and left Christianity behind retain some sense of “sin” that affects their thinking and their behavior. This may be manifested in specific cases, for example the notion that sex or nudity is “dirty,” or it may be manifested in very general ways, for example the idea that if we behave badly we’ll be punished after we die.

Within Christianity, however, the negativity of sin can be balanced with the positive doctrine of salvation. Humans may be sinners, but God still loves them and wants to see them get to heaven. Humans may constantly stumble and sin despite knowing better, but they will nevertheless be forgiven by God. Salvation, though, is not one of those doctrines that is likely retained by someone who loses their Christian faith, so if they retain the influence of sin it will be unbalanced.

This gives rise to Connolly’s complaint and the belief that people are “poisoned” through the influence of the Christian notion of sin. Assuming that his analysis is accurate, is there anything that can be done about it? The obvious answer would be to dispense with the idea of “sin,” but that’s probably easier said than done — after all, if it were so easy, people would surely have done it and thus avoided the problems being discussed here.

Then again, maybe it’s not so much that dispensing with the notion of “sin” is difficult so much as the fact that it is so ingrained in us that we don’t entirely recognize it for what it is. First, it can be indoctrinated in people from a very early age, thus allowing it to elude detection. Second, it can become merged with more generalized ideas of “wrongdoing” which, of course, no one wants to dispense with. Taken together, these would mean that avoid the poison of Christian sin becomes a rather complex task — perhaps not difficult per se, but something that requires studied attention.

Connolly’s comments here should serve more generally as a warning to anyone who has been raised within any religious tradition and has left it behind: you may not know what sort of baggage you could still be carrying with you. The things we learn in our earliest years can stick with us without our ever realizing it. If we really want to free ourselves from indoctrination in our past, we have to engage in a concentrated and directed effort to figure out what we might have retained and if we wish to keep it.