Seven Deadly Sins
Updated for the Twenty-First Century
Pride
Envy
Wrath
Gluttony
Lust
Sloth
Greed
Yawn.
With all due respect to the Church. I say, it’s time we updated the Seven deadly sins to truly reflect the black hole humanity is hurtling toward by the nanosecond. After all, other early teachings of the Church have been modified, have they not? The Church no longer burns schizophrenic teenagers who hear voices and lead armies at the stake, right? If they can update the rules for that situation, it should be no problem to update them for the modern era. The hip, happening, now kind of era where we can all relate and monitor ourselves, lest we let our id run rampant and give in to the devil that lives on all our shoulders.
This week, I ask you to allow me to explain why the old ones are passé; next week, I will offer the new alternatives. My first two-part newsletter. Come, let us sing!
LUST: Look, the church was worried about ankle exposure on women, lest their fair skin arouse the lusty feelings of men. To be clear, it was always the men who were terrified of the silly rules they themselves imposed on sex and women, but it was all the women who were stoned, burned, or in any other horrible manner of death that was imposed on them for tempting men. And speaking of convoluted thought, by the time a kid hits double digits, in the developed world and the less developed world alike, they have already been exposed to more explicit content than a 15th-century monk saw in an entire lifetime. The point is, when the President of the United States is a convicted felon for sexual abuse, and it doesn’t matter to anyone, it’s no longer a sin. If anything, the sin would be to NOT lust, or you may not be able to hold the highest office in the nation.
SLOTH: This “sin” was invented when people spent eighteen hours a day threshing, shoeing, hoeing, hauling water, and doing every other menial task on earth that would make today’s teen turn ghostly white. Imagine asking your kids to chop wood? Fetch water from a well? That would go over great. Today, “sloth” is called “recovery”, and every hackneyed celebrity, from writers to television presenters, will prescribe sloth as the cure that ails all. If sloth were still a sin, 90% of America would be in hell.
GREED: If this is a sin, we are all damned. We have more than we need. By a lot. And we tell ourselves we need more. Even the “Christian” religious leaders preach the faux (and deeply anti-Christian) “Prosperity Doctrine” to justify stealing from their congregants. Private equity firms now buy your child’s pediatric dental clinic and charge $800 for a cleaning to the insurance company; you overpay, so they can hire lawyers to refute claims and finally settle, where you still pay too much. Reaganomics fatally wounded every last shred of humanity that capitalism had, if it ever had any to begin with, but the Kardashians made greed mandatory for every American tween from the roughest trailer in Arkansas to the largest and ugliest mansion in Beverly Hills.
WRATH: This level of anger, the level used when your family is murdered by the White Colonial Christian Occupier of your land, or the Brown Colonial Muslim Occupier of your land, or whoever exiled, raped, kidnapped, or murdered someone you loved, is now a billion-dollar app called Yelp, or Facebook, or IG, or X, or whatever hideous thing is next in that line of fresh hells. If wrath was still considered to be a sin, the entire planet would be an open-ended portal to the innermost circle of hell.
GLUTTONY: Once a word that was applied to the global 1% for their extravagant feasting while the peasants starved, today, it is impossible not to be a glutton if one eats a meal out in any chain restaurant in the United States of America. The Church also never took things like Costco, “bottomless brunch,” or the idea of snacking into consideration, where the average American eats the caloric intake of a medieval peasant for a week during the appetizer course at an Applebee’s dinner. Whenever I travel for work or pleasure, I marvel at the portions in literally every other country but the good ole’ U S of A. I cook most nights. For 25 years, I cooked for at least two, then three, then four, then three again, and at least once a month for anywhere between 8 and 22 people, depending on the event or time of year. Anyone who eats at my home will tell you there is never a dearth of food, but I am a family-style person. I do not plate the food in a kitchen and present it to the eater. I’m a Jew. That’s creepy. It’s actually the most goyish, long-standing tradition of theirs I can think of, short of killing Jews on Christmas or Easter.
PRIDE: So this sin used to include a host of words from “haughty” to “uppity” throughout the ages. In general, it was about how highly one felt about oneself. Now, it is the bare bones minimum one needs to get through a job interview, where every candidate has founded a non-profit to feed widows and orphans in their spare time, has multiple degrees from the “right” colleges, and has a 42-page resume by the time they are twenty. Social media has shown that any buttwheming asshole can be an authority on everything from a country they have never visited, to a book they have never read, a political theory they don’t understand, or how to make the perfect smokey eye. Never mind that it’s all bullshit generated by a computer algorithm in a luxury suite in Qatar, Moscow, or in the basement of a Boise, Idaho recluse who lives with his mother, is marginally employed in a fake job, and goes by the screen name theonlyrealtruth. Pide is not a sin any longer. It’s a skill endorsed by your former boss on LinkedIn. “Hi, I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.”
ENVY: When we were a nomadic people, this meant being jealous of your neighbor’s ass. The animal, not the body part. but the same theory applies. Now, if you don’t have a vacation home in Tulum, take Ozempic to go down one dress size for a reunion where you never liked anyone anyway, their rank on the Peloton leaderboard, or their perfect lighting and bookcase when you see them on Zoom. Envy is the entire premise of Instagram. If God didn’t want man to be envious, there would be no filters, UCAM makeup app, or Botox.
The problem I have with these sins is that they aren’t really deadly. They have moved from deadly to daily, like when Goofus briefly decided to be Gallant, but it lasted 50 years. They are the spiritual equivalent of spices that have been left in the back of the rack in the pantry: technically still there, but no longer useful or scary. The sins of today, those that torment our souls, for those of us who still think we have one, are different now. They are more insidious. More…modern. Lust and gluttony no longer keep us awake at night; rather, it is the quiet, creeping anxieties that Philip Roth spent a lifetime and entire novels trying to exorcise, and still failed. The constant low-grade FOMO and self-disappointment. The sins we commit now aren’t punishable by hellfire; your sentence is being trapped in a group chat.
Fear not, I have taken it upon myself, as any good Jewish mother would, to update the list. To modernize it. To make it relevant. To give you the sins you’re actually committing, not the one a drunken, dehydrated male cleric dreamt up one night after the lusty wench her served his ale accidentally put her wrist on display.
Next week, I’ll reveal the New Seven Deadly Sins; stay tuned.
