It was widely reported this week that the Catholic Church has updated the well-known list of the Seven Deadly Sins to include seven brand new sins that are especially relevant to the modern world. As we have advanced our understanding of science and technology we have also, apparently, advanced our capacity to offend the Lord, and the Church decided it was time that they made us aware of that fact.
Now before you get excited and go do something crazy, please note that these are additions to the original list and not replacements, so the long standing cautions against lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy, and pride are still in effect. But we must now also be on guard against the sins of dealing or abusing drugs, despoiling the environment, fiddling with human DNA, abortion, social injustice that results in poverty, “excessive” accumulation of wealth, and (this one is especially poignant considering the source of this list) pedophilia.
So we can see that the souls of people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and even (gasp!) Oprah may be in peril unless they immediately divest themselves of most of their outrageous fortunes. And those of us who haven’t yet embraced hybrid cars and compact fluorescent light bulbs might be feeling our seats getting a little warm as well.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mean to make light of the subject of sin. I’m just not sure that anyone here on earth, even the learned men who inhabit the Vatican, can be trusted as authorities on which of our activities God may be most displeased with.
Would the Lord judge spending a great deal of money on an environmentally unfriendly SUV to be a worse sin than smacking your wife around, for instance? The above list might suggest that to the case, but I have my doubts. Morality is a complex subject, and it is generally folly to generalize too much about such things.
Still, there is no denying that the Catholic Church is a big voice on the world stage and it is not surprising that their listing of the Seven New Deadly Sins was big news. But I think the list is lacking something. What it needs to be truly memorable is an associated list of specialized eternal punishments customized to fit each sin, as the original Seven Deadlies had.
For those of you who don’t keep abreast of such things, the punishments for the original seven were:
- Greed – cooked in boiling oil
- Anger – live dismemberment
- Sloth – thrown into a snake pit
- Pride – body broken on a wheel
- Envy – dunked in freezing water
- Gluttony – force fed rats, toads, and snakes
- Lust – smothered by fire and brimstone
The sins really come alive when they are associated with a specific, horrific consequence, don’t they? The new sins need a similar list of awful consequences to drive home the point each is trying to make. Here are my suggestions.
- Drug dealing and abuse - the bad news: you have the worst incurable headache imaginable, the worse news: only one bottle of aspirin to last for all eternity
- Harming the environment – pick up trash on the roadside of a never ending highway, enduring taunts and beer bottles tossed at you by passing motorists
- Causing poverty – your job for all eternity is to restring angels’ harps for a few pennies a day, and they go through a LOT of strings
- Abortion – locked in a room with rabid Pro Life and Pro Choice advocates, can’t leave until you broker a political compromise
- Pedophilia – serenaded by Barney the Dinosaur, forever
- Genetic manipulation – spin the Wheel of DNA, be tormented for eternity by whatever monstrosity the random mutation produces
- Excessive wealth – forced to be Oprah’s lowest level lackey in paradise (O gets a pass because of all her charitable work, Dr. Phil not so lucky)
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