14 Deadly Sins
Fourteen Deadly Sins? If you believe everything you read, it appears it’s now going to be a lot harder to get to heaven. I do not believe in a hereafter, and so I need something other than papal authority to determine what is right or wrong. But I took notice when I read earlier this week that it was announced (not entirely accurately) that the Roman Catholic Church has identified seven more deadly sins. I think that to identify even one more deadly sin after so many years would be, to quote George Costanza, “like discovering plutonium by accident.”1 But my philosophical spider sense told me that this was a bit daft, so I should both think about why it was daft and check the source. The weekly English edition of L’Osservatore Romano2 had not been published so I had taken my information from the BBC.3 However, a purported translation of the interview with a Bishop who is not in a position to state changes to church orthodoxy makes it clear that there are no upstart deadly sins but that there are more forms of sin. 4 According to the BBC report the following are now considered sins: Environmental pollution, Genetic manipulation, Accumulating excessive wealth, Inflicting poverty, Drug trafficking and consumption, Morally debatable experiments, and Violation of fundamental rights of human nature. According to the Bishop, these are sinful. The BBC report provides some context, which is that the Roman Catholic Church is becoming concerned with a decrease of people confessing sins in Italy, and that those sins that are being confessed are out of tune with social reality. One take on this is that it is the marketing of sin: people aren’t sinning enough so let’s identify some more sins to bring them back to the confessional! You may consider that a cynical view, but I will show that it is not entirely so. The seven deadly sins are pride, envy, avarice, sloth, anger, gluttony and lust. They are a post-Christ-ian concept and have become incorporated in the orthodoxy of the...
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