It’s all over the news. The Vatican has been busy naming some new sins to bring that old bunch of seven big ones up to date. This is a wonderful idea, but why should the Vatican have a monopoly on the concept?
I decided to help out the Pope by proposing a few more sins to help the Church modernize. Here they are:
*Carbon Gluttony (CG): This sin involves using more carbon based materials–such as oil–than your planet or your national budget can afford. Employing this new concept, we will be able to characterize drivers of SUVs as sinners and breakers of the Revised Commandment, New Millenium, which states, of course: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oil.”
*This brings us to the second sin: Absentee Warlordism (AW): Old fashioned warlords used rape, pillage, and private armies to hold onto territory after sovereign governments broke down; however, in a global era, this concept has been outsourced. The commandment should be: “Thou shalt not seize they neighbor’s oil using paid surrogates, puppet leaders, or your own country’s adolescents to conduct the battle, while you sit home.” Better yet, just say “no” to AW, and skip the W, as well.
*Closer to home is a proposed sin which is of particular concern to the buckdata blog: Buck-Passing. Banks and lenders, now that they have completed the task of blaming middle-class consumers and the houseless poor for obtaining home loans on the only terms possible to them, are currently engaged in passing the buck–or rather the lack of it–back onto the same hapless taxpayers by coaxing breaks and liquidity from the federal government. It’s a sin from the 1980s , dressed up in a new outfit, come back to haunt us again: The Sin against Accountability (SA).
*This brings us to proposed sin number four: False Attribution (FA), as in “My predecessor in office got us into this mess.” We will be hearing more of this sin, shortly. One of the correlated commandments could probably be: “Thou shalt not continue thy predecessor’s unjust war.” You can probably think of a few more.
These are just a few of the hot new sins that could be added to the Vatican’s playlist to give the church a whole new sound. I leave it to others to ponder the matter of revising penances. Hey, isn’t it about time?
3 responses so far ↓
1 Margaret // Mar 19, 2008 at 8:52 am
It’s refreshing and uplifting to have the Catholic Pope’s pronouncements edited by an articulate woman committed to preserving our planet from the results of the seven deadly sins, particularly murder and greed. It might possibly humble the Pope that the sins Buckdata articulates are so much worse, so much bigger, and so much more deadly than any a single errant individual could commit. Maybe he could expand his vision too?
2 buckdata // Mar 19, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Thanks for your own thoughtful and articulate comment, Margaret. According to news reports, this issue has not yet reached the point of official papal pronouncement. However, the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reportedly carried an interview with a high Vatican official on the subject, according to CNN and Reuters. Stay tuned.
3 RMW // Mar 26, 2008 at 7:58 am
The sad truth is that very few people will be concerned over what sins Americans are committing.Only 10% of American Catholics bother to confess their sins at all. Since they can conveniently ignore their personal sins, is it any wonder that they can so easily ignore the sins committed anonymously for them by international corporations?
Leave a Comment