“Thou shalt not pollute the Earth”?
14th March 2008
Hello to all, and thanks for reading my first post here! My Name is Jason Chambers and I am a third year student of R.P.E at the University of Gloucestershire.
I found this interesting, the Vatican have decided its time to update the book on what contemporary actions may result in eternal damnation; quite thoughtful of them, really. Among those joining the original seven deadly sins are ‘Inflicting poverty’ and ‘Environmental pollution’
Are these really needed?
Details on the B.B.C website, link below:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7287071.stm
Hi Jason – welcome to the world of posting to the Religion, Philosophy & Ethics blogs.Other third years can gain permission to post to the blog on request: as you can see, I have slightly edited your post to add a few hyperlinks..Intersting stuff..
This is great Jas, well done. It did make me smile because the “modern evils” are really contemporary derivatives of the former “deadly sins”. Couldn’t you say environmental pollution had a root cause of gluttony and slothfulness? Or inflicting poverty may have a root cause of greed? Inflicting poverty is interesting because it probably rounds up every person living in the west, i.e. if you shop, you inflict poverty – most shops employ suppliers who exploit slave labour, etc, etc, you know the drill. Genetic manipulation may have a root in pride. By preening our masterful ideas of ‘better’ and by trying to perfect nature we practice mankind’s splendid notion of itself. Accumulating excessive wealth can be easily equalled to greed. What I wonder about is after 2000 years of fighting for the rights of people and targetting sin, if mankind has changed one iota. The issues change, but the core roots seem to stay exactly the same.
How about this thought…we’re damned if we and we’re damned if we don’t. Therefore why worry? I know that’s highly selfish but if I spend half my time worring I wouldn’t do anything and my life is far too short to worry about every consequence of my actions. Factor in that I don’t really care and I’m on to a winner!