New Sins On the Block

Sam Bowring reviews the seven new deadly sins, lifts his eyes to the sky and asks "why"?

The Vatican has updated its ‘seven deadly sins’ list to ‘fourteen deadly sins’, which sounds about as snappy as a crocodile on a good behaviour bond. The new expanded list reflects what the church sees as the worst moral failures of the modern world, one of which is apparently NOT rewriting sacred religious tenants just because you feel like it.

The new sins are: polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice. Man, this whole thing just gets less and less snappy. This is now a whole swamp of reformed crocodiles who’ve done their time and now desperately trying to stay on the straight and narrow. Completely snapless.

The original sins were quite general (greed, lust etc), and so pretty much encompass the new ones anyway. These ones are more like subdivision sins, like sin 3.1 and 6.8. Maybe the first seven were just beta versions.

I’ve got to wonder especially about ‘social injustice’. I mean we are talking about a church which has no problem going into Africa to discourage use of condoms to a people stricken by AIDS and overused land. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Either they’re giving themselves a slap on the wrist, or they’ve avoided a fifteenth sin: hypocrisy.

I just think the church is undermining itself. Isn’t much of the church’s power based on ingrained, old and traditional ways? The idea that God’s law is absolute? I mean if God really wanted these sins to be respected, wouldn’t he have told us about them in the first place? Sure, we’d have spent thousands of years wondering what the blazes genetic engineering was, but sometimes, you just gotta have faith.

I wonder if this will allow for a sequel to the popular thriller ‘Seven’. ‘Fourteen’ could have Kevin Spacey running around genetically engineering people to death, or killing them with pedophila. I’m not quite sure how that would work, but several disturbing visuals spring to mind.

And if the church can start adding amendments whenever it wants, what weird shite are we going to see next? A few extra commandments? Thou shalt not wear blue and green with nothing in between? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wireless internet? Thou shalt not check thy facebook when thy is being paid to work?

And after that, what then? Rewrite the bible?

Oh, hang on. They did that too.

Wait a minute - this whole faith isn’t just stuff that dudes in power have made up, is it?

Goodness me.

- Sam Bowring