I’m a bit of a sinner. Fortunately I’m agnostic, so I can rest easy knowing that I’m not going to spend my afterlife in some nasty, sulphurous inferno – ‘cos there is no afterlife and no inferno. What follows is going to be my own take on the Seven Deadlies, as I feel about them right now. Feel free to tell me your own.
Lust: It must be Spring, because – apart from the four-seasons-in-one-day weather we’ve been experiencing – the boy has been rather frisky lately; it’s like when we first moved in together.
Greed: Someone gave me a Whitcoulls discount voucher on Thursday, which runs out tomorrow (Sunday). I don’t need to get anything from there – only last weekend I bought myself a copy of Trinny and Susannah’s What You Wear Can Change Your Life. Yet I spent an hour in the shop looking for something to save 25% on.
Gluttony: I love food. It must be part of being Cantonese, since the culture uses the giving and eating of food to symbolise love, respect and prosperity, among other things. One reason I gave up running was because the activity has to be preceded by two full hours in which you mustn’t eat anything at all. Also, my diet doesn’t match my ethical ideals; I’d be vegetarian but I really, really like eating meat.
Envy: All my life, I’ve envied people for being taller, thinner, prettier, richer, more easy-going, more popular, more intelligent or happier than me. But that doesn’t mean I’d willingly swap my life for somebody else’s. There are aspects of my life which are really good and which I worked hard for.
Sloth: The need to do less has been the driving force of my last five years. The fact that I’ve ended up in a full-time job which is 45-50 minutes drive from home, and spend ten hours a week studying for a library degree, may lead you to believe I’m a workaholic. I’m not – I just lost my real focus when I found my career focus.
Pride: Last year I did a course with the Open Polytech (using Open University materials), and I mostly got A’s. This year I started my MLIS and seemed to doing really well still. I was damned proud of myself. And then came the fall. I’m a poor book Historian.
Anger: Little things make me angry – people leaving rubbish all over the library, knowing someone else will tidy up; having to breathe someone else’s tobacco smoke; having to drive with the sun in my eyes or behind a slow-coach driver. Big stuff makes me even angrier – people thinking its okay to treat other people like shit; people being cruel to animals; stupid political decisions.
13 comments:
I've never understood the seven deadly sins. Like sloth, surely "deadly" is a harsh sentence for a little laziness. Maybe they are being drama queens and it's really the seven not so nice sins?
exactly, kathyrnoh...it should be the seven not so deadly sins that you can indulge in occasionally as long as you don't make them a habit.
except sloth, because i need my naps.
Actually, I reckon all seven sins are good for you. Without lust there'd be little chance of continuing the human race; without sloth we'd all be working ourselves to death; without anger we'd not bother to right wrongs; blah blah blah.
How come murder isn't a Deadly Sin?
I wonder if a nice Catholic person would be able to comment?
Maybe because its already covered in the ten commandmants...thou shalt not kill...but I'm just guessing
That could be true. Perhaps they should be renamed the Seven Likely Temptations, then?
or "darth's seven things to do today..."
"...before breakfast"?
Not to get all heavy again, but
I just lost my real focus when I found my career focus.is brilliant. I'll remember this one - I have the same problem.
Violet, I think you're on to something. Notice that it's other people's sloth, littering, that angers you (righteously, I'd say)? It's easier to recognize the damage these temptations/sins can do when someone else is the perp. The list of sins is useless without a little Golden Rule action.
Nichole - I've always felt like I was "better" than other people - this is no doubt a personality flaw. But with it comes a huge capacity for guilt (general guilt, not guilt about feeling superior). And if guilt were a Deadly Sin then my list of guilts would be longer than all the rest of this post put together.
In the case of the litterbugs, etc. ... you *are* a better person. :)
Whenever I start thinking about deadly sins, some imagination (laced with generous liberties with history and religious thought thrown in) helps... I think of old Thomas Aquinas, who made the list, sitting in his medieval monastery, contemplating the worst things a monk could do other than break the 10 Commandments (thanks, Make Tea Not War).
Surely anything that made it hard to get along with others ws a problem. So when you're in a situation where you literally depend on each other for your daily bread, sloth, greed, and gluttony would be very bad. And so forth. I wonder if he'd choose the same seven today?
Have you had a look at the website near the top of the post? It's history is a little different to yours, and is quite interesting. I've pasted a list of suitable punishments:
Pride - broken on the wheel
Envy - put in freezing water
Anger - dismembered alive
Sloth - thrown in snake pits
Greed - put in cauldrons of boiling oil
Gluttony - forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes
Lust - smothered in fire and brimstone
Whoa, my bad. I didn't go too deep into that link. Good stuff there.
here comes the fire and brimstone i say.
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