I read a great article recently.
It was the back page article in the March 24, 2008 issue of TIME, written by Nancy Gibbs, and called The New Road to Hell. It dealt with the “new social sins” decreed by the Vatican recently—Environmental Pollution, Genetic Manipulation, Obscene Wealth, Infliction of Poverty, Drug Trafficking, Morally Debatable Experiements, and Violation of the Fundamental Rights of Human Nature.
She had the following good thoughts…
Sin, unlike crime or folly, is a spiritual notion: for Muslim or Jew or Christian, sin is the saboteur that keeps us from grace, separates us from God. The new list is about what separates us from one another; it makes abstract the failings that once were intimate and in the process may make sin smaller, not bigger or more relevant. Private faith already speaks to public duty, as Mohandas Gandhi suggested with his version of the seven deadly sins: “Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, science without humanity, knowledge without character, politics without principle, commerce without morality and worship without sacrifice.” The responsibility rests with the individual, but that includes the duty to take care of others as well as your own soul.
I think she wraps it up very nicely at the end. Which goes in line perfectly with what she said earlier in her article that the original mortal sins had as much to do with attitudes as with acts themselves. It’s not the laws themselves that compel us to avoid things, it’s what’s inside us that does.
Filed under: Catholicism, Genetics, Hell, Mohandas Gandhi, Nancy Gibbs, Sin, Social Conscious, Social Justice, Time
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