A Thesis of Religion (1) - The Seven Sins
So, I was thinking about some of the core stuff in Catholicism (I was raised a Roman Catholic), and one of the first things my mind caught onto was the Seven Deadly Sins. These are considered the core and sins of humanity, with all sins falling into these main categories. We have: Greed, Wrath, Lust, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, and Sloth. From what I remember or know, at least, the reason we consider these aspects to be sins, is because that's what God taught us. (For the sake of these posts unless otherwise mentioned, I will be assuming that God does exist) This naturally led me to think, "Why does God consider these as sins?" And what I've come up with is this:
Do the Seven Deadly Sins reflect the traits God see in himself that he considers negative?
The reason why I thought of this, is because I've noticed that, in the Old Testament at least, God shows almost all of these traits (I made another post talking about this a long time ago).
The most obvious is Wrath. We've all heard of the phrase "the Wrath of God," and it's because of how afraid we were of it ages ago, and how often it appeared in the older books of the bible. He flooded the entire planet to wipe out what he considered a horrible development of civilization, saving enough or each species for them to regrow, hopefully better, including the species that didn't offend him (Noah's Ark). He's also used the threat of total destruction against cities that didn't worship him (Story of Jonah), as well as sending a pillar of flame to destroy those that continued to pursue Moses and the chosen tribe of Israel (Story of Moses). While the latter and former aren't exactly out of rage, is not smiting the man who would threaten your family still feeling your wrath? There's also the entire fact that he demands respect with fear. When you say "you fear God," you're referring to how you respect him. This respect is held out of fear, for we fear the harsh punishments he gives out to those who disobey (more on this in a later post).
Next, is Envy. The only argument I feel I need is the First Commandment. "You shall have no gods before me." It is mostly interpreted as "don't worship any other gods," but its straight meaning is "Hold me in higher regard than every other god, and below none." Or simply put, "call the the best, most powerful, etc." This can tie in with Pride as well, but it's mainly an Envy of the other religion's gods and praised beings, wanting to have that praise instead of them. It's also one of the major arguments for the religion being a method of controlling people.
Now for Pride. The whole base idea of the religion is to praise, worship, and glorify God. You can't get much bigger of an ego than to have billions of people sing you praises multiple times daily.
For Greed, we look at the sacrifices that we both made and STILL make. In older times, we would sacrifice food and animals to God to show our loyalty and hopefully be rewarded with good fortune in return, similar to taxes. For a supposedly omnipotent, generous, and kind god, that's a lot of unnecessary stuff, and along tithes (though those were more justified) they were often required, or at least implied that they were. Even today we still make sacrifices, but instead of food and resources we instead give up our time, which is now even more precious than almost anything else to us.
Honestly, I've currently got nothing for Lust. I doubt that even if I did a significant amount of research I would find anything on it. God and sex really don't mix much with our logic and knowledge.
Gluttony looks right back at the sacrifices. A majority of sacrifices were food or a resource that could provide food, such as a lamb or other pasture animal. (Joke Incoming) Also, Jesus made a small amount of food into a indefinite amount, and turned water into wine. 2/2 on the food miracles.
I found evidence for Sloth in the creation of the world. In short, Genesis talks about how God created the earth and the majority of its inhabitants in 6 days, and then rested for the full of the seventh. Now, for us it seems more than reasonable. He worked for SIX DAYS IN A ROW. That's insane to us. But at the same time, we also call God omnipotent. This doesn't just mean he can do anything, it means he an do everything, and that would include being able to make the world in seconds, and he wouldn't even break a sweat. Now I can give space to the whole 6-seconds-instead-of-6-days thing because the creative process can take its time, and shaping a world would certainly take a lot of thinking and fine tuning. But having to rest afterward seems a little far fetched if we want to consider him as truly omnipotent as religion claims. So either he has the aspect of Sloth, or he's actually not as omnipotent as we make him out to be (yet another future topic).
Being like this myself, the only reasons I see right now for God telling us that traits HE HAS are to be avoided at nearly all costs, are either because He himself considers them as undesirable traits, or because He doesn't want us to be just like him (for whatever reason that is).
Well there's my $1.50. Take it as you may, and more to come later.