Sin Eater

Sin Eating is the practice of devouring the sins of another person in order to relieve them of the guilt and spiritual punishment in store for them. Sin Eating involves calling upon God for His forgiveness, as well as confronting the actions in that person's past. Holy Names used tend to come from the Judeo-Christian traditions. 
Sin Eating is a heretical practice, frequently disallowed by the Church and the other Ecclesiastical Orders because it represents someone acquiring God's salvation outside of official church dogma. As such, Sin Eaters are often secretive individuals who don't operate out in the open.
== Historical Sin Eaters?: ==
Sin Eaters were real...  sort of.  
In traditional Abrahamic religion, a person's failure to follow God's laws is called sin and represents not just a failure of action but to some extent includes a falling out with the Divine.  Such a serious state of affairs requires reparations, and this is where the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition really takes off.
Each of the three main branches of Abrahamism promotes some form of salvation, a way to wash away your sins and the attending karmic punishments that come with them.  For Xtrians, it's the self-sacrifice of Jesus, for Jews it's obeying the laws and regulations set down by Moses, and for Muslims it's submitting yourself to the Five Pillars...
But despite whatever modus operandi any official religious body has instituted, there have always been those who promoted an alternate way.  In the movie The Order, staring Heath Ledger as a member of an outcast religious group known as the Carolingians who once practiced 'sin eating' or the removal of sin outside of Christian salvation, we see a fictional attempt at such a historical phenomena. 
In real-life, there were the Carthars, a sizable heresy that grew in Northern France to threaten the power of the established Roman Church at that time.  These duelists believed that through forsaking the material world and temptations of the flesh, their souls would be set free to rejoin with the Divine in the afterlife. Their religion revolved around special rituals designed to empower their spirits and forsake the flesh. 
Several early Deists also believed that people could come to know God, just like Cayetano Ripoll, the last recorded victim of the Inquisition who taught his school students a variation of modern day Deism.  
Giordano Bruno rejected the idea that people needed spiritual intervention and supposedly taught that all souls will eventually be saved by God.  
Several saints, including St. Therese of Liseau, have also purportedly been able to consume the sins of the faithful and atone for them.  Such theological notions have caused conflict within mainstream Catholicism, but these incidents have continued.   
Category:God