What the fuck are the people in the Vatican smoking right now?
****
From the New York Times: Seven More Sins, Thanks to Vatican Lust, gluttony, greed and the rest of the seven deadly sins gathered in the 6th century will have to get used to a modern companion. A Vatican official has articulated seven new categories of sin “due to the phenomenon of globalization.”
“While sin used to concern mostly the individual, today it has mainly a social resonance,” Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti told L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City’s local paper. Bloomberg News parsed his remarks into a clip-n-savable list:
1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty
The message, according to a leading scholar on Catholic thought talking to BBC News, was meant as a reality check to priests “not sufficiently attuned to some of the real evils in our world.” There is more to life than following the Ten Commandments, it would seem.
The seven deadly sins served another purpose, too: inspiring artists from Bosch to Balanchine. Can anyone picture a similar renaissance fueled by this new list. Or has it already happened?
******
Now I can understand making polluting the environment a deadly sin, since you are making things harder for everybody else in the world when you pollute.
But doesn't drug abuse already fall under gluttony?
And stem cell research? Even the ones that come from adults? Bullshit.
But what are they fucking trying to accomplish by declaring contraception a deadly sin? They're not gonna fool the smart Catholics who are already having sex and/or raising families while having proper protection or planning - I'd rather have eternal damnation than getting AIDS or trying to raise too many kids in a house with not enough money. And the idiot Catholics who are already not using condoms and birth control while having unprotected (and out of wedlock, take note) sex don't really need that much incentive.
And aren't numbers 5, 6, and 7 redundant? If you're excessively wealthy, then you've contributed to the widening divide between the rich and the poor, and created poverty. Me thinks that they split one valid deadly sin just to make things an even 7.
Oh, and fun fact - one of the richest entities in the world is the Catholic Church.
Another fun fact - one of the surest ways to create poverty? Is HAVING TOO MANY FUCKING KIDS. WHO FUCK.
EDIT: Now that I've calmed down a bit, I've re-read the article and what I wrote, and toned down the anger and the rage. And hopefully increased the logic. Like, for example, the cardinal quoted here isn't saying that it's officially new 7 sins - it's just his suggestion. A really stupid suggestion, but road to hell being paved with good intentions and all that.
Remember kids, contraception =/= abortion.
