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Open Thread: Seven Deadly Sins…Updated |
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Following on lgs’s post, news from the Vatican:
The Vatican has brought up to date the traditional seven deadly sins by adding seven modern mortal sins it claims are becoming prevalent in what it calls an era of “unstoppable globalisation”…The new mortal sins were listed by Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti at the end of a week-long training seminar in Rome for priests, aimed at encouraging a revival of the practice of confession - or the Sacrament of Penance in Church jargon.
That’s right. In addition to wrath, sloth, pride, greed, lust, envy, and that ol’ bubble-burster, gluttony, the Vatican has decided to raise the total number of eternally punishable no-no’s to a whopping fourteen. Here are the latest additions:
- Environmental pollution
- Genetic manipulation
- Accumulating excessive wealth
- Inflicting poverty
- Drug trafficking and consumption
- Morally debatable experiments
- Violation of fundamental rights of human nature
Apparently, abortion and pedophilia only narrowly missed the list. (Good move on the pedophilia, guys…)
The Seminal welcomes your comments, criticisms, and most importantly, your confessions. In fact, if any of you have “morally debatable experiments” to discuss, we beg you to do it here.
I’m addicted to reddit. Please forgive me.
Not a problem for me, but would voting for Republicans qualify as a morally debatable experiment?
And aren’t #’s 5 and 7 contradictory?
From poet W.H. Auden’s essay My Belief. Seems he was on a similar bead as the Vatican half a century back, though from a largely secular standpoint.
“Man’s advance in control over his environment is making it more and more difficult for him, at least in the industrialized countries with a higher standard of living, like America or England, to lead a naturally good life, and easier and easier to lead a morally bad one …
Let us suppose, for example, that it is sometimes good for mind and body to take a walk. Before there were means of mechanical transport, men walked because they could not do anything else, and so they committed morally good acts. Today, a man has to choose whether to use his car or walk. It is possible for him, by using the car on an occassion when he ought to walk, to commit a morally wrong act, and it is quite probable that he will.
It is despair at finding a solution to this problem which is responsible for much of the success of Fascist blood and soil ideology.”