I smell a sequel

In Se7en, a violent and moody piece of film-noir, and one of my favorite all-time movies, Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt play two police detectives on the trail of a brutal murderer whose victims have all committed one of the seven deadly sins. The murderer dispatches each victim in a way that reflects the sin that the victim was committing. For instance, the first victim is an obese man who is forced at gunpoint to eat can after can of spaghetti sauce until his stomach bursts. Another victim is a model whose face the killer horribly disfigures, and then the killer gives the model a logical choice. He glues a phone to one hand (so she can save herself if she wants) and a bottle of sleeping pills in her other hand. Rather than live the rest of her life with a scarred face, the model chooses an overdose of sleeping pills.

Freeman and Pitt had best be ready to be called back for a sequel, for today, the Catholic Church has identified se7en additional deadly sins, and some of them are doozies! Here they are:

1. Polluting
2. Genetic engineering
3. Being obscenely rich
4. Drug dealing
   
5. Abortion
6. Pedophilia
7. Causing social injustice

OK, I can get on board with 4, 5, and 6. Numbers 1 and 2... eh. It is numbers 3 and 7 that are giving me fits. What is wrong with being obscenely rich? The mere fact that you are that rich is not necessarily a problem. Bill Gates is "obscenely rich." How many people are making a good living by being employed by Microsoft? How many people are making a good living by selling things to people employed by Microsoft? How many people have made good livings by using computers that have Microsoft products on them? How many people... you get the idea. On that so-called deadly sin, all I can tell the Catholic church is that ENVY of other people's wealth is a very ugly (and deadly) sin indeed.

Then we have that ever hard-to-define social justice canard. The best definition I can think of for social justice is to abuse a certain group of people in the present in order to atone for abuses of a different group in the past. A perfect example is Affirmative Action. Whites and males used to discriminate towards Blacks and females in academia and in the workplace, so now the tables have been turned. This of course begs the question of whether discriminating towards white males (and Asians) is any less sinful?

It is too late at night for me to stretch my brain like this, but I'm sure I could take these new deadly sins and apply each of them to one of the original deadly sins - for instance, "obscenely wealthy" could simply be put in the Greed category could it not? And couldn't pedophilia be included in the Lust category?

All in all, these new and improved Seven Deadly Sins seem rather redundant and unnecessary. If the Catholic Church is hoping to win over new converts by embracing political correctness, I think they are making a serious miscalculation. I'm not a Catholic, but this latest move by the Church does nothing to make me want to switch from the Presbyterian church I currently attend.

Good Day to You, Sir