The Seven Deadly Sins

I don’t think many people think about sin very much, especially the Seven Deadly Sins and the concept of virtue seems to have virtually disappeared from our society.  Perhaps it is time for us to revisit these so we can determine individually if we are performing in accordance with God’s desires, not the desires imposed upon us by others or by our society.  This means that we need to reflect on our conduct to determine what is in our heart and where we should improve.   Of course when you examine the Seven Deadly Sins I think virtually everyone is guilty of committing these but to what degree?  God’s standard is very high but aren’t there some mitigating circumstances?  These are my comments on these sins and what I feel are the mitigating circumstances.

1. Pride == it is not wrong to take pride in your work, your children, or even in your success as long as it isn’t done to achieve superiority over some one else or used to brag or demean others.

2. Covetousness == This is a hard one isn’t it?  Is it wrong to strive for something better?  I think not but if I want what you have without having to work for it or simply steal it then that would be wrong.  If I desire something and earn it then I don’t think that is coveting, but if  I want it and gain it through some nefarious means then that is wrong.

3. Lust == Well this is another tough one and one I think most people fail at it.  After all we all have thoughts that are lustful – you see pictures of people clad deliberately to arouse impure thoughts – that’s lust pure and simple.  So this is certainly an area where we all could stand some improvement, but God created sex so sex in and of itself is not wrong or sinful.  Rape and seduction or wrong but consensual sex is not – no matter what the preacher says.  

4. Anger== Perhaps there are some people who never anger but I think they would be a very small minority.  So when does anger become more than a small sin?  I thnk when a person’s anger impacts or dangers another person that is a sin.  Getting mad and slamming doors is probably common and not much of a sin but striking another person or harming them in a fit of anger is a major sin and should not be condoned..

5. Gluttony== Another tough one because how do you distinguish eating your fill from sinful over eating?  I don’t think many people are gluttons but taking the largest piece or the last piece might be considered gluttony.  Eating without sharing with others would be gluttony.

 

6. Envy== I guess some people are envious – mostly I think they are jealous – and I guess all of us at one time or another are envious of other’s success or wealth or fortune – but I think this only rises to sin when it becomes all consuming.

7. Sloth==My favorite.  If you think you are working hard enough then you are but if others say you aren’t that is their opinion and not yours – thus you are not necessarily slothful.  You only become lazy when you know in your heart you aren’t working hard.

Living without violating the Seven Deadly Sins is difficult because they are really not clearly defined.  Obviously there are mitigating circumstances which doesn’t excuse the sin but does reduce the magnitude of the sin.  So what about the Seven Cardinal Virtues?  Is it any easier to be good?  These are the Seven Cardinal Virtues but are they clearly defined?  When and how do you display these virtues?

1. Faith==  If you have faith in God that is all that is necessary and that faith is not measured in terms of tithing or attendance or chest pounding.  But who has never doubted or questioned? 

2. Hope== All of us have hope and hope we do better – but is that ego?  Who or what should we hope for?  How do we show Hope?  I suspect to display this virtue you must hope for things beyond yourself.

3. Charity == Some would construe this to mean giving money and certainly that is one way but I think a more meaningful way is to give of yourself.  Time spent helping others falls into this category.

4. Prudence== This is a tough one –I equate this to caution and circumspection but is this accurate.  Does this mean that you think before you speak? 

5. Justice== Be fair in your treatment of others and do not show favoritism and NEVER use your position or power for selfish purposes.   Justice normally means enforcing the law but is man’s law fair?  Is it morally right?  Does it mean that you receive what you sow?

6. Temperance== Extremes in anything is bad and drunkenness falls into this category.  Drinking is not sinful but drunkenness is.  This also applies to actions and speech. 

7. Fortitude-== Courage both physical and moral and of course moral is the harder one because this is where you must stand up for what you think is right even when everyone else is telling you that you are wrong.

I have no idea if anything here is accurate or even close to being accurate.  These are simply my views and clearly are subject to argument by others more knowledgeable than me.  My only point is that avoiding sin is probably not possible and leading a virtuous life may be equally challenging.  Evil is real, sin is real, and goodness does exist.

 

God Versus Dawkins v2

In a search of the various atheist sites I was unable to find any proof or demonstration that God does not exist. It seems that the atheists among us are driven by a rock hard belief that God does not exist and a faith in themselves and science that certainly meets if not exceeds the faith of those who do believe in God. What is interesting is how these alleged scientists not only fail to prove their allegation that God does not exist they simply branch off into completely irrelevant points and arguments. For example we have the following quote from the High Priest of the Darwinian faith – Richard Dawkins:

"Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe."Richard Dawkins

This is a rather typical refutation of God as mounted by the Atheists. Here we have Dawkins equating God to Fortune Tellers, Psychic Phenomena, and other paranormal actions. He cites the well known iconoclast James Randi as an authority while simply ignoring the various experiments and tests of paranormal abilities that illustrate that there is some validity to these claims but no solid proof that the results are the result of some paranormal ability. Hence the conclusion is that any belief in God is akin to a belief in ghosts and thus unfounded and fake. It should be noted that Dawkins takes the position that God doesn’t exist and His existence cannot be proven through any rigorous scientific process and is equated to other paranormal phenomena which is also false, if not down right fake. When this same rigor is applied to Darwinism Dawkins – like his fellow practitioners – simply fall back on adaptation and their faith that science will eventually be able to explain these anomalies. They demand that others prove God exists while not demanding that same level of proof for Darwinism.

As an example Dawkins ties evolution to DNA as we see in this quote taken from an interivew:

I think that something very special happens in the universe, when a self-replicating entity, which DNA is -- DNA is probably not the only one, but DNA is the self-replicating entity that we know. When that comes into existence, then there is a whole new game that starts. Before that, you had just physics; you have molecules bumping around, forming new molecules according to the ordinary laws of chemistry. Once, by those ordinary laws of chemistry, a molecule springs into existence which is self-replicating, then immediately you have the possibility for Darwinism, for natural selection to occur.

This actually represents the core belief to the atheists and that is that following the Big Bang the Universe was filled with protons, electrons, and neutrons that sort of randomly collided with each other and formed things like hydrogen, oxygen, and other more complex molecules until eventually – through random chance – they formed a “self-replicating” molecule. Of course he doesn’t call James Randi to verify this claim because it cannot be duplicated under laboratory conditions. In fact this claim falls into the same realm as all of those monkeys hammering away on typewriters until they reproduce all of the works of Shakespeare. The probabilities here probably favor the monkeys.

But when challenged, Dawkins – resorts to that age old response – the ad hominem attack which we see in this quote from the same interview:

"You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution. Now there are plenty of sane, educated, religious people: there are professors of theology, and there are bishops ... and so obviously they all believe in evolution or they wouldn't have gotten where they have because they would be too stupid or too ignorant. So, it is a fact that there are evolutionists who are religious and there are religious people who are evolutionists"

His statement of fact of course is really just his opinion and not an opinion shared by very many people including scientists, which he kindly acknowledges. However, he arrogantly concludes that these people must believe in Evolution because they could not have risen to their positions in life without believing in it. The flaw here is that Dawkins cannot separate his blind faith in Evolution from his blind faith that there is no God – He cannot or does not separate adaptation from Evolution but uses demonstrated adaptation as evidence that God is not involved in creation without actually offering any proof that Evolution is responsible for speciation outside of chance. He does acknowledge that there are people who believe in God as well as Evolution, but he is not one of them because he has faith in science and rejects the mere idea of a God. In fact he believes that any person capable of thought and education cannot logically reject evolution (which he confuses with adaptation) or believe in God without being an ignoramus.

But in a breathtaking display of egotism, arrogance,and overweening self-confidence, Dawkins basically says that he is RIGHT and anyone who disagrees with him is WRONG. This is a vivid example of the open-mindedness one observes in academia today.

Are Liberals Literate

Is it my imagination or has the Political Left gone completely crazy? I read books, think about what they say, then comment, but from my recent observations this is not how the Political Left operates. It seems that they look at the author and then dismiss the book as trash without ever actually reading it, if you doubt this look at the reviews on Amazon. You will notice that any book written by any known Conservative like Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, or Bernard Goldberg is automatically trashed. Even books written by recognized authorities but whose contents do not follow the revealed wisdom of the left, are also dismissed as trash by Liberal reviewers who did not actually read the book. Apparently Liberals know how to write but have not mastered the art of reading and certainly have not mastered the art of critical thinking.

Another example of the inability of the Political Left to grasp or even understand an alternative point of view is their attitude about Fox News. Ask any of the Political Left if they watch Fox News and their automatic response – once they have caught their breath and wiped the froth from their mouth – is of course not!! It is simply a Conservative Propaganda machine whose motto of “Fair and Balanced” is a joke. Apparently, these same people view NBC, CBS, PBS, and ABC as voices that provide the only real truth about those idiots in the White House. What is really interesting is that you never see any real Conservative voice on any of these networks, whereas, Fox makes a real effort to give the Political Left a voice. However, most of the more radical lefties won’t appear on Fox News – why is that? The only logical conclusion is that they and their political beliefs cannot withstand scrutiny.

In fact on close examination it seems that the Political Left is short on facts and long on beliefs, it is sort of a faith based political party bordering on a religion. For example, the current flap over Global Warming is being pushed very heavily by the Liberals, ignoring the positions of real Climatologists and their facts. They confuse the undisputed event – Global Warming – with the very disputed cause – Human activity. Then the Liberals rage on and on about Evolution and the Yahoos who insist on viewing this as a Theory rather than a fact. Any one who questions Evolution as a fact is immediately labeled a “Creationist” and relegated to the nether world ignoramus, in spite of the growing evidence that Evolution as described is not totally accurate. Clearly it is OK to believe in Evolution because this means you have “faith” in science but not OK to doubt it because this means you have placed your faith in religion, God, or even in some agnostic system requiring empirical proof.

This contempt for empirical data seems to lie at the very heart of Faith Based Liberalism. Rachel Carson wrote a book titled “Silent Spring” that postulated that the widespread use of DDT was killing the environment. Carson had no credentials and her book and its conclusions were later to proven to be totally false – in effect a hoax, but that book drove the banning of DDT – worldwide. J. Gordon Edwards a Professor of Biology at San Jose State would actually eat spoonfuls of DDT to prove it was not harmful to humans much less animals. In spite of all of the empirical evidence to the contrary DDT remains banned and is costing millions of people their lives due to the resurgence of Malaria, which was almost wiped out from the usage of DDT. Liberals distrust facts and empirical evidence that challenges any of their beliefs. In effect the Liberal establishment places their faith in the unsupported conclusions of a woman dying of cancer who arbitrarily blamed her cancer on DDT to the scientific evidence indicating she didn’t know what she was talking about. To the Liberal mind – people are less important than the environment.

Perhaps a more recent egregious example of Liberalism at work is the recent case of the three Duke University Lacrosse Players, who were accused of raping a black – exotic dancer. Even in the face of documented evidence that cast doubt on this accusation from the very outset, eighty eight Professors (Liberals and Marxists) held public lynching of these young men’s reputations. Those professional racists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, raced to site to mug before the TV cameras and accuse the failure to immediately put these boys into jail as an example of the rampant racism prevalent at Duke University. As we now know these boys were totally innocent and falsely accused and their crime was being white and their greatest was having rich parents. Now that these young men have been declared innocent Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have vanished from the scene, never offering any apology, or retracting any of their accusations. The Liberal Professors who raced to condemn these young men without a trial and in the face of evidence that they were falsely accused, have yet to offer any apology. The reality is that the Political Left relies entirely on emotion and a belief system that Western Civilization, White People, the Military, Christianity, and above all Conservatives are evil and any evidence to the contrary is simply ignored because Liberals have Faith in the essential rightness of their position and reject any fact that doesn’t support their beliefs.