Christianity warns against the seven deadly sins. The Catechism of Christian Doctrine 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 the 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.
Pride is the root of all these sins. It is the ultimate sin from which the other six deadly sins proceed. Pride means you think you know better than God what is right and disobey him by becoming angry or slothful or covetous etc. St Thomas Aquinas taught that pride was the ultimate sin and he defined it as taking credit for your own achievements and not attributing them entirely to the work of God. For example, Jesus said as often as you hurt one of his brethren you hurt him. So when you get praise you should respond, “Give it to God for my actions not me”. This arises from the Christian notion that God gives us every second of our lives and we would turn back into the nothing we came from if he took his power away. And also from the notion that God gives you help to do good works for him. Christians are forbidden to boast or glory in their good deeds (Romans 4, Ephesians 2). They believe God has given a plan for salvation that gives us no reason to think we do anything worthwhile of ourselves but that God does it for and in and through us. In reality, pride is thought to be equal to self-esteem.
The Christian man and woman dress up for Church. Do they really want people to think, “I praise you God for these people looking so well!”? and never, “They look well.” Do they really want people to keep the focus on God and not them?
If Christianity opposes pride, the result will be the harassment and pressuring and downgrading of people who don’t have a strong faith. The Church wants to create an addiction to God. This is an extreme love of control and power.
There is nothing wrong with rational realistic pride.
The way pride is linked to God and made a sin implies that atheists and people who are not sure of God’s existence are dangerous and full of pride. They are sinners if pride is a sin and we are to give all the glory to God. It is a sectarian bigoted idea. For Christians to teach it is sheer arrogance. They are being prideful. We cannot get away from our pride. We can warp it, we can hide it, we can disguise it, but it is still there.
Christianity teaches that since we are to love God with all our hearts and be willing to be tortured to death for him if we were asked to suffer that that all failures with respect to love for God manifest the sin of pride. To be glad then that God called you to be a priest and as a result you have prestige in your community and a swanky house and car instead of asking you to suffer dreadfully for him would be the sin of pride. It shows that you are glad not to have had the chance to prove your complete love for God.
The experts all disagree on what God has said so to avoid the sin of pride you have to submit in humility to men telling you what to think about God and this concept is what you call God. It is really a form of idolatry.
The Church ignores the fact that if you put so much value on your interpretation of evidence for God and on your understanding of God that you would die for it, that is pride in the extreme! You never die for God but for your understanding of God and the reasons he might be thought to exist!
With religion there are far more shoulds and shouldn'ts than there would be without it. There are all those extra rules to be kept. If you say somebody should do something, you are saying you know better than they do and they are bad if they do not do what you say. Religion then with all the extra shoulds is actually exacerbating pride! It is easily seen why the bitterest and most evil-minded people out there are often to be found in the chapel.
Since pride is the root sin and the cause of the deadly sins it follows that say the deadly sin of sloth or laziness 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. 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.
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.
Making anger a sin was a clever way of stopping the people
from protesting against the unjust actions of the clergy. 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
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.
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. 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.
Lust can be controlled. Eros cannot.
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.
Lust brings less pain than eros.
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.
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 parential 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 though we help them.
The sins care 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. 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. 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! Its 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.