The Seven Deadly Sins (Vices)

 
Virtue is making the intellect and good sense control your passions and needs and desires. A vice is whatever does not do this.  A vice can even disguise itself as a virtue.  A virtue can be mingled with a vice too.

Christianity warns against the seven deadly sins. These are more precisely vices.  The Catechism of Christian Doctrine (Catholic Truth Society Publication) says that they are called deadly sins for they are so dangerous as they are the root causes of all sins.
 
John Cassian, a theologian, came up with eight deadly sins. He listed, avarice, fornication, anger, sloth, gluttony, vainglory, pride, and depression as the sins.
 
Pope Gregory the Great came up with traditional list of seven, pride, envy, anger, depression/despair, avarice/greed, gluttony and lust.
 
The list in The Catholic Catechism of Christian Doctrine goes: pride, gluttony, greed, envy, sloth, lust and anger. It is scandalous that a religion should condemn depression. This list seems to avoid doing that. Don't be deceived. Depression is not just sadness for no reason. The depressed person may feel angry or that they are not getting enough out of life - greed. Depression and at least one of the deadly sins will be inextricably linked. We abhor anything that explicitly or implicitly attacks those who suffer from depression. Even a doctrine that causes a person to ask themselves if they are sinning by being depressed is to be severely opposed.
 
The Christians see the deadly sins as bad enough but they are worse when they become vices. A vice is a habit of sin. A vice is not a temptation. Do not confuse the vice and temptation.
 
The vice of pride lurks behind Christian so-called virtue.

Pride is the sin of thinking you can do without God and by implication those who are his instruments.  It is seen as a distorted self-love, it is too much love for yourself and this is love you are taking from others and even from God.
 
Since pride is the root sin and the cause of the deadly sins it follows that all sins are based on the notion of independence from God. Take the deadly sin of sloth or laziness - it is wrong because it is neglecting to do work for God. The sin includes the sin of apathy which is not caring much for the things of God – the commonest sin in Christendom. The sin of lust is a sin for you are not seeing the beauty of God in another person but treating the person as a thing not a mirror of God. The sin of gluttony is bad because God made food to feed you not for you to overdo it with so once you are filled or satisfied you should stop eating. The sin of envy, wanting what another has for yourself instead of them, is a sin not because you want to take something away from another person. It is a sin because you want to have what God gave them as if you are wiser than God. If you are angry it is because you don’t believe God uses even sin for his own purposes to bring good out of the evil.
 
Envy is when instead of taking pleasure in what you have, you endure pain at the thought of what others have. If envy is a sin then is it a sin because it hurts you even if it never or need never hurt anybody else? Or is it a sin as it implies you don't love others enough? Or is it a sin because it hurts you and longs to see others lose what they have? If it's hurting you is not the reason, then it follows that others do not matter either when you don't matter. So loving them cannot matter. If envy is a sin because it hurts you then it is really right to say envy is the sin? Would it not be better to say that it is not envy that is the problem but that it hurts you? So hurting yourself is the sin not envy. If the problem is your failure to love others then to love you is to love you as somebody who would hurt them if he or she could find a way. Condemnations of envy are manifestations of self-righteous hypocrisy.

We only feel jealous and envious when we see the other person as being our equal and feel we should have the good things she or he has or that we think she or he has.  That could be why equal rights people are often so hostile and are in the grip of a rabid sense of entitlement. Interestingly, pride tells you to consider others on the same level as yourself.  But we see that it is the virtue of humility that risks you being spitefully jealous and envious.  Humility can seem like the real deal until that happens.  When it does it is really pride that borders on humility but that is not true humility.
 
Pride is envy in the sense that you will suffer if others are better than you. As all the sins are rooted in pride, it follows that they are all tainted with envy.
 
The sins imply that you are nothing and God is everything. If anything, they would put most people and all sane people off religion. And since religion likes to control the moral instruction people get, this will have the result of people going off the rails altogether. They will see it that as they reject the religion and the poison it spews they will scrap anything good they are taught too for it will hold no credibility for them. Such people need the help of atheists and secularists to become decent members of society.

We all have an inordinate pride in ourselves. We need that pride to get out of depression. There is no start to recovery without arrogance. In depression, everything inside you tells you there is nothing to feel even a little good about. You have to choose to ignore this evidence and rise above it. You need to see yourself as better than what your perception tells you. You need to be defiant and arrogant. 

The deadly sins are really a charter for the persecution of heretics, atheists, philosophers, and weak apathetic believers. They incite to hatred.
 
Gluttony means you should not eat more than what you need. We all eat too much. And nobody is clear on what they need. Eating sweets must be a sin for you certainly do not need them.
 
In relation to greed, when the popes had temporal power and tremendous wealth they said it was the will of God and it wasn’t pride or greed that was behind it. The clear message is that you can do what you like as long as your heart is clean. For example, you can persecute heretics as long as you do it out of a feeling of love.
 
Making anger a sin was a clever way of stopping the people from protesting against the unjust actions of the clergy and from raging against God. If anger is a sin then anger against the men who represent God and who rule his kingdom for him as his vicars must be the worst form of anger. Anger involves a feeling that you would like to do harm and be violent in some way and yet the Church approves of the story of its angry Jesus thrashing up the Temple.
 
Covet means you desire something somebody else has and wish you had it instead of them. The sin of wishing you could do something bad to take it off them is a higher level of covetousness. It is seen as selfish to want to enjoy something instead of your neighbour enjoying it. He is not seen as selfish for enjoying it and not giving it to you to enjoy it instead of him! The commandment implies that you must not consider yourself as important but consider others as important.
 
The ten commandments given by God in the Bible end with two commandments forbidding one to covet his neighbour's goods or animals or wife. They are concerned with desire. They forbid unlawful desire even if you won't act upon those desires. The wish of some that they had the holiness and virtue some person has instead of that person is also covetousness. It proves that it isn't necessarily selfless and altruistic to want to be holy and virtuous!
 
The anti-covetousness commandments contradict, "Love your neighbour as yourself", as popularly interpreted. If you keep the anti-covetousness commandments, you would naturally have to wish that you had half of what the person has. He has half and you have half. It fits, "Love your neighbour more than yourself", far better.
 
Lust is treating a person as a sexual object. In other words, it cares only about the pleasure of sex and not the person you have sex with. Lust is just about the sex. If the husband wasn’t treating his wife as a sexual object then she wouldn’t need to wear lingerie. The fact is that we are made to treat people as objects up to a point. Lust is the only sin Christianity fusses about. Christianity allows all the other deadly sins despite its lip service condemnations of them. You are allowed wealth if you are a pope for example and convince yourself you are not greedy. But lust is never allowed.
 
Lust is distinguished from the kind of love known as eros. Eros is romantic love. Because the lovers torment themselves when the loved one does not want them and hate the loved one and don't want the loved one to be happy with anybody else it is an inherently selfish form of love. It is selfish to torture yourself over somebody that does not want you. Lust and eros both have the power to be very destructive. Eros can exist without lust. Eros only is fun sometimes. Most of the time it brings pain. Sometimes and sometimes all the time it brings torment and sadness and it cannot be chosen or controlled.
 
Lust is selfishly using another to gratify a desire. So is eros. With lust you can use somebody for five minutes and then it is all over and forgotten. The using only took place for a short time. But with eros you try to make the object of your desire addicted to you so that when you are not around they will suffer horribly. Eros is worse than lust.
 
Lust can be controlled. Eros cannot. Eros is more powerful.
 
Lust can be made very safe. Eros cannot. People in love often pass on dangerous diseases to each other in sex. Lust never forces somebody to have sex without a condom. With lust you can avoid the occasions where you might do something stupid. Eros is an addiction and increases the chance of doing something crazy. The lovers get blinded by passion.
 
Lust can bring less pain than eros. People assume that it is only good things that can be abused. This is incorrect. Bad things can be abused too in their own way.
 
Eros is not love. It might be the feeling of love but this love not about putting another person first for themselves but about putting another first to satisfy your need to. The love is an illusion - a bait. If you really care about somebody you will not want them to suffer an addiction to you. End of.
 
Romantic love and eros are different but they are cut from the same cloth. If lust is wrong so is eros. And eros must be more wrong!
 
Eros as a basis for marriage would have to be a necessary evil for the sake of producing children. This would imply that contraceptive sex and homosexuality are wrong.
 
Eros and parental love are upheld as the main forms of love in the world. Yet both are about fulfilling the needs of the one that loves. They will lead to good deeds but the ultimate motive behind those deeds is the wish of the lover or parent to fulfil their own need to do these things and have loving feelings. They are selfish. And yet the world makes a big drama about some people teaching egoism, the view that we must look after others for our own fulfilment so that our motive is to help ourselves rather than others. We help them to help ourselves feel good. We do it for that prize.
 
The sins are more about what is in the heart than what you do. Christians would say that when Jesus, who was God, commanded the Jews to kill homosexuals by stoning it was out of love to stop people copying the example of the homosexuals and to give euthanasia to the homosexuals who were better off dead than gay. They have no choice but to rationalise like that. The seven sins are dangerous.

It is illogical and irrational thinking that does more harm than these sins. The person who is too proud does wrong through his stupid thinking not his pride. Yet irrationality and wilful stupidity are not listed as deadly sins. Lying was omitted because Christian theologians and leaders are famous for looking at arguments against their religion and ignoring them which amounts to lying. They even use arguments that have been proven to be faulty years ago to convince gullible people today that the faith has any credibility.
 
Love the sinner and hate the sin pretends that sin is something that a person does but which is not part of the person. It pretends that a you as a person is just there like something static and degrades you by saying that you are not a doer. Love the sinner and hate the sin implies that that people should and often do love you more not less because your sins. If you really believed the rule can be kept you would love it when people imagine that you are guilty of an astronomical amount of sins.
 
Sin is more than just part of a person, it says what kind of person they are. The person is the sin. We feel personal hatred for sin and the rule asks us to pretend that we don't. It asks us to hate people but to hide it. The rule itself should be classed as a deadly sin! It's hypocritical nonsense. It is worse than any of the deadly sins. It is extreme pride to pretend that your hatred for a person is really love!
 
Society used to love the seven deadly sins. The ban on greed and pride was useful for stopping people from trying to better themselves. If they showed ambition and good business acumen they were accused of these sins. They were manipulated to accuse themselves of such sins for trying to do well in life.
 
Modern Christians today are so hypocritical that they can endure any sin but the alleged sin of being judgemental. This "sin" is not listed at all in the seven deadly sins. It could be understood as an act of pride and envy. Very fair and humble judgement however would be seen as a virtue.
 
The Christians define selfishness as the sin of looking out only for yourself. The selfish person is nice to others only because he has an agenda. His niceness is just a means to get what he wants out of life without any real regard for others. All sin consists of selfishness. Despite Christianity's boast that it loves the sinner and hates the sin, the truth is that it is demonising those who it finds guilty of selfishness. It ignores society and modern psychology's near consensus that everybody is a mixture of both selfishness and unselfishness and nobody is ever completely one or the other. Christianity will naturally agree with society and modern psychology but will not admit it. Christianity does not really love the sinner but hates him for it smears him. It is loving the sinner and hating the sin doctrine stems from its arrogance. Pride would be too soft a word for it.
 
Unconditional love is supposed by Christianity to be the only true love. The one who loves you unconditionally will love you no matter how evil you get - even if you become evil itself. This is because you are loved simply because you are a person. But you cannot love somebody if their personhood becomes evil for that is to love evil. The objection that this is merely hypothetical misses the point. If you wouldn't love even then, your unconditional love is not as unconditional as it seems. It is a pretence.
 
Christianity would say the whole system of religion it has is all about healing the seven deadly sins. If so, the whole system is corrupt. Its miracles fail to prove its claims for only corruption can support corruption. Satan must be behind them if they are real!

For secularists the tendency to religious faith is a deadly sin ...