Seven Deadly Sins Minus One

[KQ]

Remove one sin to make the world a better place - which one would it be?



Lust
Lust, or lechery (Latin, "luxuria" (carnal)), is intense longing. It is usually thought of as intense or unbridled sexual desire, which leads to fornication, adultery, rape, bestiality, and other immoral sexual acts. However, lust could also mean simply desire in general; thus, lust for money, power, and other things are sinful. In accordance with the words of Henry Edward Manning, the impurity of lust transforms one into "a slave of the devil".

Lust, if not managed properly, can subvert propriety.

German philosopher Schopenhauer wrote as follows:

Lust is the ultimate goal of almost all human endeavour, exerts an adverse influence on the most important affairs, interrupts the most serious business, sometimes for a while confuses even the greatest minds, does not hesitate with its trumpery to disrupt the negotiations of statesmen and the research of scholars, has the knack of slipping its love-letters and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts.



Gluttony
Gluttony (Latin, gula) is the overindulgence and overconsumption of anything to the point of waste. The word derives from the Latin gluttire, meaning to gulp down or swallow.

In Christianity, it is considered a sin if the excessive desire for food causes it to be withheld from the needy.

Because of these scripts, gluttony can be interpreted as selfishness; essentially placing concern with one's own impulses or interests above the well-being or interests of others.

During times of famine, war, and similar periods when food is scarce, it is possible for one to indirectly kill other people through starvation just by eating too much or even too soon.



Greed
Greed (Latin, avaritia), also known as avarice, cupidity, or covetousness, is, like lust and gluttony, a sin of desire. However, greed (as seen by the Church) is applied to an artificial, rapacious desire and pursuit of material possessions. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things." In Dante's Purgatory, the penitents are bound and laid face down on the ground for having concentrated excessively on earthly thoughts. Hoarding of materials or objects, theft and robbery, especially by means of violence, trickery, or manipulation of authority are all actions that may be inspired by greed. Such misdeeds can include simony, where one attempts to purchase or sell sacraments, including Holy Orders and, therefore, positions of authority in the Church hierarchy.

In the words of Henry Edward, avarice "plunges a man deep into the mire of this world, so that he makes it to be his god".

As defined outside Christian writings, greed is an inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one needs, especially with respect to material wealth. Like pride, it can lead to not just some, but all evil.



Sloth
Sloth (Latin, tristitia or acedia ("without care")) refers to a peculiar jumble of notions, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological, and physical states.[31] It may be defined as absence of interest or habitual disinclination to exertion.

Unlike the other capital sins, which are sins of committing immorality, sloth is a sin of omitting responsibilities. It may arise from any of the other capital vices; for example, a son may omit his duty to his father through anger. While the state and habit of sloth is a mortal sin, the habit of the soul tending towards the last mortal state of sloth is not mortal in and of itself except under certain circumstances.

Emotionally and cognitively, the evil of acedia finds expression in a lack of any feeling for the world, for the people in it, or for the self. Acedia takes form as an alienation of the sentient self first from the world and then from itself. Although the most profound versions of this condition are found in a withdrawal from all forms of participation in or care for others or oneself, a lesser but more noisome element was also noted by theologians. From tristitia, asserted Gregory the Great, "there arise malice, rancour, cowardice, [and] despair". Chaucer, too, dealt with this attribute of acedia, counting the characteristics of the sin to include despair, somnolence, idleness, tardiness, negligence, indolence, and wrawnesse, the last variously translated as "anger" or better as "peevishness". For Chaucer, human's sin consists of languishing and holding back, refusing to undertake works of goodness because, he/she tells him/her self, the circumstances surrounding the establishment of good are too grievous and too difficult to suffer. Acedia in Chaucer's view is thus the enemy of every source and motive for work.

Sloth not only subverts the livelihood of the body, taking no care for its day-to-day provisions, but also slows down the mind, halting its attention to matters of great importance. Sloth hinders the man in his righteous undertakings and thus becomes a terrible source of human's undoing.

In his Purgatorio Dante portrayed the penance for acedia as running continuously at top speed.



Wrath
Wrath (Latin, ira) can be defined as uncontrolled feelings of anger, rage, and even hatred. Wrath often reveals itself in the wish to seek vengeance. In its purest form, wrath presents with injury, violence, and hate that may provoke feuds that can go on for centuries. Wrath may persist long after the person who did another a grievous wrong is dead. Feelings of wrath can manifest in different ways, including impatience, hateful misanthropy, revenge, and self-destructive behavior, such as drug abuse or suicide.

People feel angry when they sense that they or someone they care about has been offended, when they are certain about the nature and cause of the angering event, when they are certain someone else is responsible, and when they feel they can still influence the situation or cope with it.

In her introduction to Purgatory, Dorothy L. Sayers describes wrath as "love of justice perverted to revenge and spite".

In accordance with Henry Edward, angry people are "slaves to themselves".

[KQ]

Envy
Envy (Latin, invidia), like greed and lust, is characterized by an insatiable desire. It can be described as a sad or resentful covetousness towards the traits or possessions of someone else. It arises from vainglory, and severs a man from his neighbor.

Malicious envy is similar to jealousy in that they both feel discontent towards someone's traits, status, abilities, or rewards. A difference is that the envious also desire the entity and covet it. Envy can be directly related to the Ten Commandments, specifically, "Neither shall you covet ... anything that belongs to your neighbour"—a statement that may also be related to greed. Dante defined envy as "a desire to deprive other men of theirs". In Dante's Purgatory, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the struggle aroused by envy has three stages: during the first stage, the envious person attempts to lower another's reputation; in the middle stage, the envious person receives either "joy at another's misfortune" (if he succeeds in defaming the other person) or "grief at another's prosperity" (if he fails); the third stage is hatred because "sorrow causes hatred".

Envy is said to be the motivation behind Cain murdering his brother, Abel, as Cain envied Abel because God favored Abel's sacrifice over Cain's.

Bertrand Russell said that envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness, bringing sorrow to committers of envy whilst giving them the urge to inflict pain upon others.

In accordance with the most widely accepted views, only pride weighs down the soul more than envy among the capital sins. Just like pride, envy has been associated directly with the devil, for Wisdom 2:24 states: "the envy of the devil brought death to the world."



Pride
(Latin, superbia) is considered, on almost every list, the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins: the perversion of the faculties that make humans more like God—dignity and holiness. It is also thought to be the source of the other capital sins. Also known as hubris (from ancient Greek ὕβρις), or futility, it is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one's own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of other people.

In even more destructive cases, it is irrationally believing that one is essentially and necessarily better, superior, or more important than others, failing to acknowledge the accomplishments of others, and excessive admiration of the personal image or self (especially forgetting one's own lack of divinity, and refusing to acknowledge one's own limits, faults, or wrongs as a human being).

What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 203.

In Ancient Athens, hubris was considered one of the greatest crimes and was used to refer to insolent contempt that can cause one to use violence to shame the victim. This sense of hubris could also characterize rape. Aristotle defined hubris as shaming the victim, not because of anything that happened to the committer or might happen to the committer, but merely for the committer's own gratification. The word's connotation changed somewhat over time, with some additional emphasis towards a gross over-estimation of one's abilities.

The term has been used to analyse and make sense of the actions of contemporary heads of government by Ian Kershaw (1998), Peter Beinart (2010) and in a much more physiological manner by David Owen (2012). In this context the term has been used to describe how certain leaders, when put to positions of immense power, seem to become irrationally self-confident in their own abilities, increasingly reluctant to listen to the advice of others and progressively more impulsive in their actions.

Dante's definition of pride was "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbour".

Pride is associated with more intra-individual negative outcomes and is commonly related to expressions of aggression and hostility (Tangney, 1999). As one might expect, pride is not always associated with high self-esteem but with highly fluctuating or variable self-esteem. Excessive feelings of pride have a tendency to create conflict and sometimes terminating close relationships, which has led it to be understood as one of the few emotions with no clear positive or adaptive functions (Rhodwalt, et al.).

Pride is generally associated with an absence of humility. It may also be associated with a lack of knowledge. John Gay states that "By ignorance is pride increased; They most assume who know the least."

Benjamin Franklin said "In reality there is, perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history. For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility." Joseph Addison states that "There is no passion that steals into the heart more imperceptibly and covers itself under more disguises than pride."

[JimmyCarter]

Make the world a better place by eliminating it or by making it not a sin?

[KQ]

Make the world a better place by eliminating it or by making it not a sin?

Eliminating it from the character of humans.

[dan_pdx]

Eliminating it from the character of humans.

Make this a poll! I'm going to pick greed though, that seems to be really screwing things up for us right now.

[m2711c]

Sloths.... No doubt, those motherfuckers need to go.




That’s the face of pure evil right there.....

[Tor-tour]

Could we start with just getting rid of religion, and see where we go from there?

That might knock at least three or four off that list.

[Gcooker]

Sloths.... No doubt, those motherfuckers need to go.




That’s the face of pure evil right there.....

Those fuckers even get out of their trees to shit.... oh the humanity

[mcski]

https://youtu.be/0cmqwbZa6_w

[KQ]

https://youtu.be/0cmqwbZa6_w

Yeah.... bad movie <shudder>

[byates1]

powerful gnarly. i wonder how the actors do it. gnarly.

[mcski]

Yeah.... bad movie <shudder>

Bad?!?! I think it was great. I really like fincher's work. Plus the movie has A+...memes!

[KQ]

Bad?!?! I think it was great. I really like fincher's work. Plus the movie has A+...memes!

Scary. I don't do Scary. Too susceptible to bad dreams when I watch movies like that but yeah... I watched it back when I was young and foolish. Now I just say "no" to stuff like that.

[mcski]

Definitely scary, disturbing and a little too plausible for s real life version. I get that

[panchosdad]

We need more sloth, I'm doing my part. Gluttony has to go.

[Svengali]

[SB]

Sloths are kewl, how about we delete red light runners?

[SumJongGuy]

Pride - the Professor
Covetousness - Mr. Howell
Lust - Ginger
Anger - Mrs. Howell
Gluttony - the Skipper
Envy - Mary Ann
Sloth - Gilligan

[BCMtnHound]

Put me down for the removal of original sin: Pride. Too many inflated, fragile egos out there.

[BCMtnHound]

With 7+billion folks out there and counting, I think we can manage a few sloths

[old goat]

Envy greed and wrath we could do without. Pride--meh. Lust, gluttony and sloth should never have been sins. The fathers of Christianity were some fucked up, repressed, guilt ridden dudes.

[oftpiste]

Pride, envy, greed, and wrath are so intertwined..... hard to pick one.

[ill-advised strategy]

The fathers of Christianity were some fucked up, repressed, guilt ridden dudes.

It's like a list of things you don't want your servants to be like.

oh, don't be too prideful to come clean the toilets at the rectory. Sure you can work two jobs and donate to the church, no sloth for you! Sure the priests drive Cadillacs, don't be envious! We're fucking your kids but don't get all wrathful about it!
Don't be getting all lusty and enjoying yourself, you've got to be out there making money for the church!

[Vt-Freeheel]

It's like a list of things you don't want your servants to be like.

oh, don't be too prideful to come clean the toilets at the rectory. Sure you can work two jobs and donate to the church, no sloth for you! Sure the priests drive Cadillacs, don't be envious! We're fucking your kids but don't get all wrathful about it!
Don't be getting all lusty and enjoying yourself, you've got to be out there making money for the church!

[KQ]

Now now now... forest for the trees here.

Ignore the history behind it and think about a world where one of those seven didn't exist.

What if people were not conceited and prideful? Would there be more kindness and tolerance? Is that what we need? And how about envy and all the emotion that is associated with that such as jealousy. Without jealousy would there be less domestic violence in the world? More equality? These are the things I was thinking about.