The silence is broken!

Fa-So-La-La

Howdy, Beehive faithful! I am here to break the deafening silence of the last few days-- we done 'r-u-n-n o-f-t' to Tyler, TX for a very very good church meeting. But we are back now, so all the dazzling brilliance and witty comments will now resume.

I was reading National Review magazine in the car on the way to Tyler, and I found something especially interesting in the 'This Week' section--

"-- The Seven Deadly Sins are pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Lust, Avarice, and Gluttony, traditionally remembered with the aid of the acronym PEWSLAG. Well, goodbye PEWSLAG, hello CABDHGS. A polling organization in Britain asked a thousand citizens to modernize the list. The new deadlies are, in descending order of sinfulness: Cruelty, Adultery Bigotry, Dishonesty, Hypocrisy, Greed and Selfishness. Note the interesting shift of emphasis visible here. Formerly the essence of sin lay in offending God by failing to curb one's lower nature. Nowadays, sin means causing pain or mental distress to other people. To put it another way, virtue used to consist in moral cultivation of the self; now it consists in being nice. Something has been lost here, surely."

I find this fascinating. Do you also see how the old Seven have more to do with your relationship with God, whereas the new seven are about relationships with man? Very humanistic, I think-- it shows the modern humanistic attitude that we can all get along without God if we are all just nice to each other and hug all the right trees. :-)

My 'humanities teacher' (we watch his lectures on video) has said that to a non-Christian, being good simply involves not hurting anyone. But for a Christian, goodness is not passive, it is not lack of sin-- it is active good. The way he put it was that non-Christians want 'nice news;' they just want everyone to get along-- this I think is seen in kid's TV, where the moral usually is something about tolerance or manners or sharing-your-crayons-with-the-other-little-children. But Christians have Good News-- the message of Christ and Him crucified. Something to think about.