Sin ’08

Not to be outdone by Microsoft’s Office ’08 product release, the Vatican has decided to release, after only 1500 years of waiting, “Sins 08”, an updated addendum to the great book of sins that will certainly find something to send you straight to hell.

Ok, I am all for the Christan Church trying to teach right from wrong, and when you think about it, the list of sins has not been updated in a long time, so perhaps it was time to take a tiny step towards the 21st century finally. Now I do not necessarily agree with all the items on this list, but the list is here for our guidance.

New sins include some obvious ones, including polluting, genetic engineering, drug dealing, abortion, creating poverty, and causing social injustice. But there are few others that make me wonder if the Catholic Church is heading straight to hell on its own rules?

Included in the new list are two that cannot help to make even the most devout Christan smile in irony. The first of these is “hording wealth, or being obscenely rich.” It is now a sin to be too rich? Even if you use your money for good? Not good news for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Allan, and other billionaires. I find it amusing that the richest people I know are all conservative Christians. How odd is that?But then again, how about the Catholic Church and the Vatican itself, notably one of the wealthiest organizations on the planet? Claiming a worth of over 15 billion, and you can be sure it is a lot more were you to count all the jewels, paintings, and other precious items hidden in unnamed vaults, are they not breaking their own rule on sin? But wait, by not sharing all that wealth, are they helping to create poverty and social injustice? The Vatican uses this immense wealth to control a power machine of amazing political clout, pushing to reduce services and care to people because they may believe differently than the church. Is that not social injustice? Remember, this is the same church that does not want the use of condoms discussed EVEN when in reference to health and AIDS prevention.

And with all this wealth, I am sure a lot of the homeless and poor people around the world could use some of that money to help prevent poverty, so are they not preventing poverty here either. That is, if enough money is left after all the payouts for lawsuits concerning pedophilia.

Which, of course, brings us back to the second item on the interesting list of 7 new sins, pedophilia. Now it took me some time to stop laughing on this one, but perhaps I should just be happy now that the Catholic Church has actually recognized any of these new sins at all, much less added this one to the list.

But what does that mean for the so many priests that have been found guilty of this sin? How come some of them are still in the Church? Do they truly allow sinners to continue to preach to the masses? As one comedian put it, it is not the priests fault, but rather a parish full of good looking boys. They just need to move him to a place with uglier children?

I am sorry, but the irony here is just too much even for me, and if you do not see it, then nothing I can add here will change your mind. But if that is the case, let me know when you take off your blinder and climb out of that cave.

Strangely missing from this new list of sins might be things like, or, I don’t know, lying? How about forcing others to lie in the name of the church? (a few things about birth control and sex come to mind, along with a thousand other “views” on the world.) I think being a hypocrite should be a sin…well, never mind, we would all go to hell then wouldn’t we? What about a fear of people who think differently than you? Shouldn’t that be a sin? Intolerance of any kind?

An interesting start Vatican. Too bad, given your track record these last 25 years, that from you it is hard to take this list seriously.

OK, those of you who have a difference of opinion can now let that intolerance show. God forbid, no pun intended, I may have actually pointed out a few flaws in your system. Let the flames begin. After all, we all need to get ready for hell anyway!