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Celebrating the Seven Cardinal Sins
One of my gay friends (“Chad”) posts repeated rainbow-colored memes and pictures on his Facebook feed, every day during “Pride Month.” He views gays as a civil rights group: Why should someone be treated differently simply because they were born differently? At first, I found it odd that Chad insisted on celebrating his pride in, well, in simply being born different. Nothing he accomplished, but just the way he was born. That seems like me spending a month every year celebrating my pride in being born with brown hair. I mean, brown hair is nice, but it seems like an inadequate reason for parades.
Anyway, after a while, it occurred to me that Chad’s celebration of pride could serve as a model for other holiday months. Perhaps we should have a celebratory month for each of the Seven Cardinal (Deadly) Sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, and Sloth. (Obviously, we would not celebrate The Seven Heavenly Virtues. That’s no fun.) Fortunately, the LGBTQQIP2SAA+ founding, um, fathers had the foresight to observe Pride Month in June, so each of the remaining six months of the year could be used to observe the six remaining Cardinal Sins. It works out so perfectly, I can’t believe that it’s a coincidence. This must have been the plan all along.
August will be fun – an entire month celebrating Lust! Woohoo! And I’m not sure exactly how some of our neighbors will observe the months celebrating Gluttony and Sloth. What, exactly, would they do differently? And, if I’m being brutally honest, I’m not sure what I would do differently in some of these months.
The Seven Cardinal Sins have always been commonplace in society. But they’ve moved beyond commonplace. Now they have become not just accepted but even admired in our society, to the point that we can have a month celebrating one of them and no one notices anything odd. You might think that somebody in their initial planning meetings might have said, “Hey, guys – er – people: You think maybe we should choose a different word? This is technically one of the Seven Cardinal Sins, ya know. This would be easy for some right-wing Christian hate-filled bigot to misinterpret and make a stink about it. How about, say, ‘confidence’ or something less potentially inflammatory?”
But we are a post-Christian society. Those in that meeting likely don’t know what the Cardinal Sins are, and it never occurred to them that Pride was one of them. Throughout history, religion has always been overlooked at times. Now it’s irrelevant. To many of us, anyway. So this concern probably never came up.
Imagine if I showed up to a Pride Parade, dressed in rainbow colors, carrying the following sign (with PRIDE in rainbow colors):
- Proverbs 16:18 – PRIDE goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
I think most people wouldn’t even understand my point. Although I’m fairly certain that any quote from the Bible would be met with hostility, whether they understood it or not. They don’t have to understand something to hate it. In fact, it’s much easier to hate something you don’t understand.
This is why I fear our new culture, which intentionally does not teach children about Judeo-Christian ethics, and teaches that Western Civilization in general (and America in particular) is evil. This lack of understanding enables people to hate that which has done so much good in the world. The leftist desire for power requires them to destroy other sources of authority. They destroy them at their peril.
Actually, they destroy them at everyone else’s peril, as well.
The Judeo-Christian ethic teaches that we are all God’s children and that we all have value. We are important to God. And He expects a lot from us. We do our best to please him, although we frequently fail. But God loves us despite our shortcomings, so we continue to try.
The fact that we are all God’s children helped lead to the concept of personal liberties, property rights, and the rule of law – not just for royalty, but even for lowly peasants. If God loves each of us, then we all have some value, and thus, some rights. All of us. Personal liberty is a wonderful thing.
But with personal liberty, comes personal responsibility. Liberty does not mean ‘just do whatever you want.’ Only a virtuous people can handle liberty, without disastrous consequences. There are external authorities on virtue, like God, for example. But what if we don’t care for some of His outdated opinions on virtue? Surely we can just agree amongst ourselves what virtue is. That way we can change it to suit our tastes, as times change.
This has not turned out well. Why even try to follow rules, if we can change the rules whenever we want? Plus, it makes no sense, unless there is no God.
If there is no God, then some will conclude that their existence has no deeper meaning beyond amusing themselves. Hunter S. Thompson could explain this better than I, but without the guardrails provided by an overseeing God, you can go from liberty to chaos to misery very, very quickly.
Unbridled liberty should lead to happiness. It really should. Believe me, I wish it did.
But it doesn’t. For whatever reasons, it just doesn’t. It creates a hole in your soul that can never be filled. There are a lot of reasons for this. Many books have been written about this, including the book quoted above. But regardless of what those reasons are, this is just the way it is. Aristotle had a point with his discussions of logos. Man’s Search for Meaning sounds simple, but it can be complex.
Humans are funny creatures.
We’d rather not think about that, however. We’re having a wonderful time. So we march in parades and try to enjoy the moment, while trying not to think about where we’re all going.
And trying not to wonder why we have this nagging feeling, way deep inside, that something is just not quite right. We don’t want to search for meaning. We just want to have fun. So if we’re having so much fun, why are we so miserable? What’s wrong? What’s missing?
“It must be someone else’s fault. Those people over there. With their Bibles and their churches and crap. Man, I hate them, and everything they stand for. Whatever the heck that is. We must destroy them. Then, we’ll finally be happy.”
Leftist control of our educational and religious institutions has been an incredible success for them. Their fostering of ignorance, hate, and intolerance has put into motion things which will be difficult to undo.
I don’t see how this ends well. I don’t think that the left will see that they’ve won until we’ve all lost.
NOTE: Credit for the colorfully modified quote from Proverbs above, and for part of the inspiration for this post, goes to the indispensable Babylon Bee.
This was also partially inspired by stories told to me by my two kids in college. Their descriptions of their friends’ fun-filled misery added a lot to this as well. Many of their friends are having so much fun that they need Prozac and weekly counseling sessions.
Published in General
Real pride versus false pride . . .
If Child Protective Services hasn’t taken custody of this boy yet, they aren’t doing their job . . .
By the way, I think it’s the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Cardinal Virtues.
I am sort of proud of my nearly white hair and beard. I earned them, and one doesn’t get this old by being either weak or stupid.
There’s Mardi Gras to be had, but it’s not a whole month, and worse, it is designed to get the ya-yas out in preparation for a long-haul low-sin Lent.
I suspect there are enough gays who left the church in anger and resentment to have filled everyone else in. Like witches, gays are believed to be thumbing their noses at God. Some of them buy into this idea to the point that offending religious sensibilities becomes part of the…’joy’.
Too right and more’s the pity. I think the story of the Golem is about the madness that comes from lack of purpose.
“Funny creatures” as you say.
Chicken wire and hair plugs!
Or, to put it another way, virtue is defined as the absence of vice. i.e. “I’m good because I have not done wrong.”
This is in opposition to the ancient Christian/Platonic conception whereby vice is defined as the absence of virtue. i.e. “Man is fallen because he fails to live up to (God’s/Nature’s) ideal.”
It probably shouldn’t be all that surprising that a bunch of neo-pagans embrace the polar opposite of the fundamental moral axiom of Western Philosophy.
I’ve said elsewhere that they chose pride because they were expected to feel shame for much of Western history (and likely non-Western history, I find the citing of more accepting past societies to be unconvincing special pleading, though it is a conservatism of a sort, so I can only sneer so much…) and are over-correcting for that as much as they are over-correcting for being closeted with being so out that they are ‘out there’.
Maybe it is necessary and will eventually lead to an equilibrium. It looks unsustainable. And annoying.
Etymologically, the word “happiness” simply means “good luck” or “good fortune”.
Therefore, liberty should be defined as the freedom to choose your own strategies for improving your odds.
The thing is, nothing, not even liberty, can eliminate risk. Fortuna always gets the final say.
No, ur a ho!
I found an old, yellowed 3 x 5 card with these words typed on it. Those guys who wrote the Constitution, they were all nutters. They were occult, dilettante dabblers who knew exactly what they were saying when they wrote that you have the right to the Pursuit of Happiness: Good luck, boy.
I’ve also been wondering about the “Celebrating the Seven Cardinal Sins”.
…
The best way to remember the seven deadly sins is to think of Gilligan’s Island and its theme song:
Gilligan = sloth
The Skipper = gluttony
Mr. Howell, the millionaire = greed
Mrs. Howell, the millionaire’s wife = wrath
Ginger, the movie star = lust
The Professor = pride
Mary Ann = envy
(The wrath, pride, and envy representations might be a be exaggerated, but…)
Somebody has to do it:
If we ever stop teaching Gilligan’s Island in school our nation is doomed.
Yes I think it’s really about “not shame.” Which makes sense, right? Eventually “pride” will just be a word used as a habit, like “independence” day… that is, with out much thought about why independence is a “thing “
By the way Doug, I too lost a relative to HIV… it was a bad time, and trauma does strange things to people.
Still wish we celebrated something like Prudence. Or Forbearance. Or, society doesn’t care to know your sexual practices, thank you very much. Keep your sexuality to yourself — and I mean heterosexuals, too!
I think it’s akin to society overcoming racism. Remember that old quote about “We’ll know (institutional) racism is over when the first black baseball manager gets fired”? That’s what I think about Pride month. We’ll know your sexuality isn’t a player in your public life when everyone is judged on his merits and there’s no special designated celebration for anyone based on sexual attraction or skin color or other victim-group identity. Let’s just get over it and do the right things already.
Instead we’re heading in the opposite direction. Now, every time a black manager or coach gets fired, it’s chalked up to a conspiracy perpetrated by white supremacists. I believe it would have been a great landmark achievement for the country if Barack Obama had been fired in 2012, as he so thoroughly deserved.
I am a live and let live kind of guy. I don’t care what Gays do in the privacy of their own bedroom as long as they are not hurting someone. But I don’t buy that someone is born Gay, necessarily. Homosexuality is far more prevalent in high disposable income low stress cultures, and dramatically less in cultures where survival is an everyday concern, which implies there is a choice. Even then the Gay Lifestyle is still a choice, what ever one feelings or inclinations are, almost like a political stance like being a Republican or Democrat. There have been many a homosexual father, and many Gays that have changed from straight to Gay, which kinda says that many Gays are bi-sexual, not homosexual, implying a choice of sexuality. I refuse to be made to care about their lifestyle choice. It should not be a right that I have to accept that lifestyle choice.
Pride Parades will be around for as long as LGBTQ people need them. Except for the new born we all arrive in the present with history. This is not necessarily a personal criticism (@drbastiat – sorry for being waspish) but rather describes a universal condition.
I suspect that when a truly similar need among Conservatives for “Prudence and Forbearance Parades” develops, Conservatives will start having them. Right now it seems (just from checking Ricochet, which is my sole window into the Conservosphere) that people are hanging in the first three stages of dealing with the loss of cultural dominance, perhaps the Prudence Parade won’t happen until stage five?
All sorts of things are more prevalent in high disposable income low stress cultures—Multiple Sclerosis, for example—without being chosen.
Having said that, it has always been my suspicion that homosexuality comes about through both nature and nurture, with the “nurture” part acting as a sort of pressure valve. Homosexual persons may be useful under some circumstances and not so useful under others. And so cultures create stronger or weaker prohibitions against it, up to and including none at all.
I think it is quite possible that, in a hunter-gatherer environment, an Uncle (for example) who, being gay and less likely to reproduce, but nonetheless usefully male, might just enhance the overall survival prospects of his nieces and nephews and therefore his genes. Under other circumstances—what we might think of as “all hands on deck!” reproductive emergency—-a homosexual man or lesbian woman remains perfectly capable of having children of his/her own. Even in a high income, low stress culture, it happens; between us, I’m sure we can come up with a few examples.
What is remarkable is that, in low-income and high stress environments—e.g. Yemen—there are still homosexual men and (though they are less visible) lesbians. When you can’t help but be gay when being gay means you might get chucked off a building… that’s a pretty powerful argument for nature putting her big fat thumb on the scale. So to speak.
I dunno, Zafar. That sounds suspiciously like those “white fragility” arguments as to why people might question the leftist narrative on systemic racism. There are —I think, anyway—reasonable questions to be asked about the costs and benefits of the present sexual climate. Since you have been peering through this sole window, you’ll be aware of Thomas Sowell’s truism “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.”
When it comes to human sexual behavior, this means there isn’t a perfect, ideal, all-natural, no-misery sexual culture that we are going to be able to arrive at, one where men and women get everything they want and nothing they don’t. In reality, each of us as individuals and all of us collectively, as a culture, have to grapple with all the complexities inherent in our sexual condition: youth, age, dysfunction, disease, casualness and commitment, fertility and infertility, lust and love, freedom and constraint, abundance and scarcity, joy and sorrow. It’s never been easy and my guess is that it never will be, because human beings are what we’ve always been.
I wouldn’t count on a tidy, teleological progression through the stages, whatever they are: for at least a few-odd thousand years we’ve been trying to get even the simplest stuff straight. “Do I want a baby?” “Whose kid is this?” and “will she have sex with some other guy?” and “Am I allowed to care?”
My favourite explanation (predictably) blames the mother:
On the same study:
Richer societies do trend to lower fecundity as a rule, which supports Unsk’s statement about the variation in the prevalence of homosexuality in different kinds of societies.
That part is just nonsense, at least in my case. I just don’t like the idea that moral disapproval of homosexual acts is, in the minds of a lot of people, equal to either hatred or fear of the person(s) committing the acts.
Just how I’m perceiving it GD.
And I don’t think it’s limited to any single group (what else is that ‘not my president!’ tanty?) or country or culture.
Wrt systemic racism: if one side of politics has one view on whether system racism exists or not while the other side of politics has one (other) view of this, my suspicion is that both groups have some significant blind spots on the issue.
Sure, but the level of difficulty in dealing with this varies. We are not all on a level playing field when it comes to this yet (given the fact of individual or group history), though I hope that eventually we all will be.
In a good way. Meaning everybody’s level of comfort with who they are trends up, not that some people’s level of comfort with who they are goes down.
Fair enough.
How do you feel about this moral disapproval no longer being reflected in the broader society or its laws (say about things like marriage)?
You forgot the fear of latent homosexuality.
We are not all on a level playing field for anything.
I’m not sure I understand the question. If you are referring to the changes in laws that result in homosexual acts between consenting adults no longer being illegal, I’m OK with those. Legalization of homosexual marriage should have been done, assuming it should have been done at all, in the legislatures, not the courts.
No matter what it was going to happen in the courts. The problem being is that SCOTUS chose the wrong rationale and made a pig’s breakfast of it. Simply put, they should have just enforced the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution. For awhile you would have created a handful of states with marriage tourism but then every state would have eventually fallen in line.
Indeed. So horses for courses.
What I dislike about the Oppression Olympics is that they make people so reluctant to recognise and be happy about the advantages that they do have, and so small hearted about acknowledging where other people struggle. Iow we stop engaging with all of reality and focus on a cherry picked, politically convenient view of the world.
I don’t see any long term, healthy benefit from this.