It is a sin to brush crumbs onto the floor
Oh the vacancy of the religious mind.
Women are prouder than men, but men are more lustful, according to a Vatican report which states that the two sexes sin differently…”Men and women sin in different ways,” Msgr Wojciech Giertych, theologian to the papal household, wrote in L’Osservatore Romano…Msgr Giertych said the most difficult sin for men to face was lust, followed by gluttony, sloth, anger, pride, envy and greed. For women, the most dangerous sins were pride, envy, anger, lust, and sloth, he added.
Oh for godsake, who cares. Gluttony, sloth, lust, pride – mind your own business, why don’t you, and while you’re at it, why don’t you worry about moral failings that actually matter? How’s that for an idea? Why don’t you leave sloth and gluttony up to everybody’s mummy and daddy and turn your attention to cruelty and oppression and exploitation instead? Why don’t you stop straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel? Eh? Eh? Why don’t you work on your priorities? Why don’t you improve your moral sensitivities?
The Apostolic Penitentiary, one of the Vatican’s most secretive departments, which fixes the punishments and indulgences handed down to sinners, last year updated its list of deadly sins to include more modern ones. The revised list included seven modern sins it said were becoming prevalent during an era of “unstoppable globalisation”. These included: genetic modification, experiments on the person, environmental pollution, taking or selling illegal drugs, social injustice, causing poverty and financial greed.
Taking drugs! Genetic modification! Mixed in with social injustice and causing poverty. They’re hopelessly confused.
They’re hopelessly naive too. They seem to have assumed what women confessing the sin of pride means that they commit it more often rather than that they’re just more likely to confess to it.
Do you thinking anyone has ever entered a confession box to confess the sin of genetic modification?
“I knew it was wrong Father, but the flesh is weak!”
The BBC article is written in the tone normally reserved for “boffins have discovered an equation for the perfect Big Mac” stories.
The Vatican must have hired a PR company to promote confession.
“Taking or selling ILLEGAL drugs”? So drinking a beer (in the USA) was a sin during Prohibition, but now it’s not?
For what it’s worth, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, they are technically called the 7 capital sins, not because they are the worst sins, but because they are the root of all other sins. A bit of trivia for the day.
Or cardinal sins, or mortal sins.
In parallel order to the sins they oppose, the seven holy virtues are chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.
Sorrow and discouragement also once belonged to the once eight opposing Cardinal sins.
Marie-Therese,
What’s the holy virtue opposed to using an illegal drug? Using a legal drug? Will I get time off from Purgatory for smoking a doobie in Amsterdam?
Crikey, NB, if you adhere to the opposing aforementioned virtue you will surely go to pot! :-0-
NB: “Taking or selling ILLEGAL drugs”? So drinking a beer (in the USA) was a sin during Prohibition, but now it’s not?
Yes. Christians are to obey the ruler (government) that God has given power to. Serious risk of being exterminated as insurrectionists otherwise.
Ah, ChrisPer, if only the most vocal and conservative segments of Christianity – from the Papenfuhrer himself to the Southern Baptist jackasses down the street from me – actually adhered to the letter and spirit of “Render unto Caesar…” better! I would vastly prefer simple obedience to the rule of law to their constant efforts to pressure every government everywhere (All you Caesars, get in line!) into catering to their various theocratic fever dreams. Tiny-minded Talibani, the lot of them!
Apparently, they have a version of the Gospels where the whole phrase – from the lips of Jesus himself, I understand – reads “Render unto Ceasar what is Caesar’s, unless Caesar fails to kowtow to your every dogmatic whim…” My version has something about rendering unto God what is God’s – but I’m just a heathen, so what do I know about the sophisticated nuances of theological exegesis?
G, you may be ‘just a heathen’, but I am quite sure you are not an ignorant one. You will therefore be aware that in modern democracy, people seem to participate in public debate. Unfortunately, this happens whether or not their betters agree with them but said betters can if they wish label any response to their preferences as ‘kowtowing to their every whim’. That’s freedom of speech.
I enjoyed your ironic exposition of the half-accepted, half-implemented bible quotation. It reminds me of the way many of us (including MEEE!) ignore Paul to accept a woman pastor, and ignore Jesus’ explicit words to delightedly approve the marriage of two people who have been divorced, and defend our positions to those who do not. But in that euphoria I must have missed all those chanting christian mobs trying to implement theocracy by… suspending the constitution first up, bombing drill halls, assassinating presidents and planning re-education camps was it? Riiiiiiiight.
Curiously willing to accept the mores of temporal power is the Vatican here. After all, it is entirely up to the local secular government which drugs are illegal at any given time.
On early sex, I had to laugh. Having just faced a campaign from the catholic church to prevent us doing something entirely sensible regarding the law on children who engage in sex with each other (I work in Government, rather not say where in case their cyber-gnomes read this) in a bored moment I go and discover that the Vatican City has the lowest age of consent in Europe…
“suspending the constitution first up, bombing drill halls, assassinating presidents and planning re-education camps was it? Riiiiiiiight.”
No. What’s your point? Xian theocracy is milder than that therefore there is nothing to object to? Or what?
I object to theocracy even if it refrains from bombing drill halls, assassinating presidents and planning re-education camps, because there are other things to object to. Is that simple enough?
And spare us the pseudo-populist bullshit, please. We got enough of that from Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin to last a lifetime.
Patrick,
Wow, twelve? That does raise an eyebrow. But it’s ok, because if you are in a position of influence (teacher, guardian, step-parent) you have to wait until they are fifteen.
Ah, more knee-jerking objections to things nobody said from ChrisPer. I very clearly expressed the desire that these idiots would end their ceaseless prattle – I didn’t say they should be forbidden from prattling by law or force. I was in fact exercising my own free speech to criticize theirs, go figure. And since their frequent, loud speech does in fact very often consist in demanding that governments implement their theocratic fantasies, I accurately characterized their speech acts as I criticized them.
While I’m glad you are so liberal as to accept a woman pastor and celebrate the marriage of a divorce man and woman, ChrisPer, are you liberal enough to celebrate the marriage of two men or two women? Actually, I couldn’t care less whether or not you are. I would simply point out that opposition to gay marriage is in fact almost entirely religious in origin and motivation and has no rational secular justification; and that making the religiously-motivated injunction against gay marriage a matter of law is therefore theocratic by any reasonable definition. I could come up with several dozen more examples of right wing Christians advocating theocracy and pressuring governments to institute their own religious preferences as matters of law, but I don’t need to: You read B&W and you’re already perfectly familiar with them.
Like OB said, it is perfectly sensible to object to theocracy even if what theocrats advocate is shy of death squads and the like. I would add that, given the many examples I could point to such as the Christian Reconstructionist and Dominionist movements, your dismissive rhetoric looks pretty damned stupid. There are in fact a frightening number of nutjobs in our country who DO want to suspend the Constitution and stone sinners and what-not – and they have more influence in one of our two major parties than any sane person should be comfortable with. No, they are not likely to succeed in actually making their theocratic principles the basis for our government; but they are likely to keep sliding the Overton window further and further towards theocracy unless people of good will oppose them at every turn.
But you go ahead and keep being a contrarian jerk who regularly defends the indefensible for no good reason whatsoever, if that’s how you get your jollies. *sigh*
The age of consent in the Federal District in Mexico City (along with 18 other states) is 12, it is one of the lowest in the world. Roman Catholics make up 89% of its population so therefore it should be unsurprising!
Angola, Philippines, Zimbabwe and USA travelling citizens also have age of consent set at 12.
The average age, worldwide, is 16. Shame on the Vatican!
They ARE people’s mummy and daddy, that’s the problem. Only with vastly more social and political clout.
Well yes, in a sense, but then they’re an incoherent mummy and daddy. Even the most bored nauseated irritated parents don’t generally tell their children that bad table manners are worse than torture – but the Vatican does the equivalent. It micromanages everyone’s lives the way parents do, but it does it with complete moral idiocy.
And then there’s the Catholic church’s actual record at parental work – which we all know a good deal about from Marie-Therese. Kidnapping, slave labour, systematic degradation and humiliation, deprivation, physical abuse. With mummy and daddy like these, who needs enemies!
For the want of repeating myself here, (while I am once again transported back in memory) mammy and daddy words were synonymous only with floggings. As children in Goldenbridge industrial school in the past, on a perpetual basis, had invariably to stand barefoot on a cold landing (right outside the sisters’ cells) sometimes even into the early hours of the morn, waiting to be flogged by the religious head honcho, who supposedly acted in loco-parentis, because of not having reached their quota of sixty decades of rosary beads.
It was a barbaric practice – can you just imagine children having to wait from approximately seven o clock in the evenings, outside their parent’s bedroom, until the parent’s so happened to arrive up to bed, which could be as late as twelve o clock or thereafter, all because the children never brought enough money home to their parent’s.
The laughable thing, also, is that children were sometimes forgotten, by the head honcho, as she entered her cell and never returned. As a consequence children were left all night at a time on the cold draughty landing. We have as adults discussed this with each other and have come to the conclusion that it was on the part of the religious deliberately done to further antagonise their charges.
Oops, almost forgot, mammy and daddy words were hollered by children as they held their margarine-coated red raw flogged palms under their warm underarms for self-soothing comfort.
Bastards bastards bastards.
And this is the Catholic church that presumes to preach morality to everyone. Does Ratzinger spend any time beating his breast over what was done to Irish children? Does he learn any humility and bashfulness from that history? Not that you notice.
Punishing children for not making enough fucking rosaries to sell – for not putting in enough time tearing up their hands pulling wire about. It’s enough to make you SCREAM.