Worse than gluttony

I saw an online image and followed the links to a place where it is used, though I don’t know where it originated. That place is the blog Theofrak and a post written by Welltraveledpair back in 2012.

The Church, likely the Catholic Church, created a list of Seven Deadly Sins. Supposedly, if a person committed these sins they would be condemned to Hell (or at least have a much harder time getting into Heaven). These sins are: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.

This particular writer asks: Seriously? “There is nothing worse than sloth and gluttony?”

The image I chased proposes the Real Seven Deadly Sins: “Apathy, Cruelty, Duplicity, Hypocricy, False Morality, Abuse of Power, and Cultivated Ignorance.”

A good list! But we’re not done. A few more worse than sloth and gluttony are proposed. Here are some of them:

Reism: The belief that humans beings are merely things, capable of becoming property.

Categorism: Inventing groupings for humans and assigning membership, then ranking individuals according to the supposed attributes of the groups.

Ethnocentrism: The belief that a particular ethnic group is superior to all others.

Chauvinism: The belief hat a political unit is superior to all others and worthy of absolute loyalty. It is a foundation of organized injustice.

Imperialism: The belief that it is right to impose the system and values of one group onto another.

Hmm.

The original list of sins all apply to individuals. They can be used by people in power to oppress others with spiritual violence – you do these things and you’re going to Hell!

And all the replacement sins, both the ones in the list of seven and the extra ones, are sins of those with power. They’re actions that cause oppression.

Not surprising they aren’t considered sins by those who created the original list.