Today the Vatican announced the first update to the list of deadly sins since the 6th-century, expanding the list from seven sins to fourteen sins.
Each sin on the list is guaranteed to give you a nice warm spot writhing in agony amongst fire and brimstone and all that good stuff, so I thought I'd have a look at the list from my agnostic perspective.
First, let's have a little refresher: Pope Greg put together a little list of seven things thou shalt not doeth, which bought about a good basis for many Western moralities. This list was as follows:
- Lust: You cannot engage in any form of sexual addition, any form of love that is not secondary to the love of your deity, adultery, rape, bestiality, and so forth. However, it would appear pædophilia was okay until recently.
- Gluttony: You cannot eat excessively, sloppily, daintily, expensively, or eagerly. You also cannot eat with great enthusiasm, apparently. This describes almost everyone I know.
- Greed: Any personal gains by any form of stealing or deception is a bad thing, however many definitions seem to extend this to the acquisition of great personal wealth in general.
- Sloth: Being a Sloth isn't evil, but being slothful is. Any modern definition only covers laziness and people who can't be bothered doing things for various (and pathetic) reasons, however the original definition seems to state that any sort of sadness or depression was inherently evil. If you're not working yourself to the bone and you're letting yourself get depressed, then you're in big trouble.
- Wrath: This includes revenge, and other things such as murder. Many definitions also add that the denial of a truth is also evil, which could explain why the Vatican are planning on erecting a statue of Galileo!
- Envy: You cannot wish you had something someone else has. Maybe that's a little too generic, but ultimately Envy makes Greed somewhat redundant.
- Pride: You are not allowed to desire yourself to be in a position of higher stature or make yourself more attractive than anyone else around you. This is the most serious of the original seven sins, and is apparently how Lucifer was chucked out of heaven and became Satan.
So this list is already a little wishy-washy after centuries of being interpreted in many ways. Pope Joe has decided to leave his mark by adding another seven wishy-washy deadly sins to the list:
- Genetic Modifications: The Vatican have long made their feelings known about genetic engineering, and now it's official: You will go to hell if you perform genetic modifications! I presume this will extend to things such as growing genetically modified plants and animals, or GMOs. I never liked the idea of see-through frogs anyway.
- Human Experimentations: This is self-explanatory in the modern era and is unfortunately a century too late, possibly highlighting that the church is ever-so-slowly catching up with the modern world.
- Polluting The Environment: Jumping on the environmentalism band-wagon a little late, the Vatican have decided that pollution is evil. It's about bloody time.
- Social Injustice: This self-explanatory sin irks me somewhat. It's interesting that a “social injustice” reportedly includes pædophilia (finally) and abortion, but these are not apparently clear. This could easily cover Polluting The Environment and Causing Poverty. Like the original list of seven sins, I guess a little bit of padding was necessary.
- Causing Poverty: Anything related to causing poverty is a sin. Depending on how you interpreted Greed and Pride from the original list, this could have already been a deadly sin. I agree with this, however it is unfortunately either very generic (and all first-world countries are guilty of it to a certain extent) or it's too specific (the few people who could turn things around are too powerful to care, at which point they probably fall into the Sloth category). I'm interested in the actual definition here.
- Financial Gluttony: The Church, and presumably God, now frown upon the excessive acquisition of personal wealth. This goes beyond Greed to include legitimately acquired wealth. I presume the huge hoarded wealth that lies inside the Vatican will soon be available on eBay in an effort to adhere to their own rules.
- Taking Drugs: Anything related to illicit drugs, from selling to taking, is now a big no-no. This is interesting, since the Church would therefore need to take cues from individual legal systems. For example, some countries have legalised the used of cannabis, where as other countries offer a death sentence if you're found with the stuff.
So if this “Hell” place exists, I suppose I'll be seeing you all there?
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