Just to add a twist:   Do we need to reflect on yet another dimension to understand the sins of GLBT persons?

Just a quick thought which hopefully I will develop more later:

I remember some of the sins that preoccupied male clergy in the early church were the woman's propensity toward lust, deception, lasciviousness and debauchery??????

This was apparently based on the sin of Eve, but I felt it to be an embarassingly direct projection.  They accused women of being "primitive" in their lusts.  Ironically, women were probably too damn busy dying in childbirth and being married off at 9 years old.

I thought about renaming this to " The Surly Sins of Brutes & Broads" to see if it would get more response, but the system won't let you do that any more.  So I guess I'll just have to sit here and wait by my keyboard. .  .   .     .

This is Christina de Pizan.  She is considered to be the first female in Western culture to have made her living by writing.  She is probably the first voice to challenge those stereotypes mentioned earlier.  Men were unchallenged in this discourse, writing outrageous lies about the nature of women.  She was educated, literate and courageous enough to  stand up to what was passed off as common knowledge of the time.....

She essentially said, "Show me who these awful women are.  Are they your mothers?  Your wives?  Your sisters? 

It was a form of pornography at the time -- men devising all kinds of female transgression and writing about it.  It persisted.  Much of the witch trials utilized the stereotypes (women are easy marks for the devil).

rishi, can you expand on "busyness" being a form of sloth? It's an interesting idea, and one I hadn't considered before.

I think the seven deadly sins were connected with the reflections of a male dominated society, but they can still be used as a guide by both sexes. Labels have their problems, however. Take "sloth", for example. I could be slothful when it comes to housework, but anything but when it comes to gardening.

Thus, I've always found it useful, when someone complains of say, a person's greed, to ask "in what area?"

(It sure cuts through a lot of "holier than thou" crap!) 

 I think I would agree with most of the excerpt.  It also very effectively shows  the abundance of hypocrisy found, and taught in the church.  

The list of theological "don'ts" corresponds exactly with the real life "do's".  This amounts to saying one thing but doing another, which I think, is the true test of honesty and maturity.

From Wikipedia:

"The modern Roman Catholic Catechism lists the sins as: "pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth/acedia". Each of the seven deadly sins now also has an opposite among corresponding seven holy virtues (sometimes also referred to as the contrary virtues). In parallel order to the sins they oppose, the seven holy virtues are humility, charity, kindness, patience, chastity, temperance, and diligence."

There is a flaw in the quote in the OP, and it's disappointing and not surprising.  It's just such an essentialist oversimplification of what patriarchy consists of.

Patriarchy isn't simply "men".  Not all men are in the position of power, making decisions, defining what is or is not sin.  Patriarchy refers to a more narrow group, namely the dominant male social elite.  The popes and higher clergy, who were indeed all male but not all males - not the worker tilling the soil, regardless what conformation their genitals are, by any means.  So there is a class component here as well.  Control was not and is not limited to women in patriarchal systems.  And then there are women who accept and enforce the whole system of patriarchy...  It's very much more complicated than is laid out in the quote.

So that's where this nonsense about men's sins vs women's sins falls apart.  Take men and women, in various gradations, of lower social class, racial minority groups, economic means, etc, etc, etc.  And it's all in shades of grey.

The thing that bothers me most about this sort of essentialist position is that "women are x" sort of thinking.  Women think such and such.  Well, no, some women might, and there could be a stereotype to that effect, but not all women do think such and such.  It places the stereotype and those who do not conform to it are...  What?  Less woman? 

It just makes me want to punch somebody.  (Oh, that's not a very womanly thought, is it?)  ;-)

I suppose that might come under "wrath".  Shame, shame.  LOL

Shalom

Mate

Certainly nothing happens outside of a context. But I think it is quite rash, Timebandit, to simply dispose of these persons' thoughts as being devoid of wisdom just because their language doesn't conform to some 'post-essentialist' conventions that are currently popular among university types.

Hi Pilgrim,

I haven't read Mary Daly's work, which the quote refers to, so I'm not sure what her take on "sloth as busyness" is.  I have read elsewhere, though, that the current significance of the English word "sloth" as something like "laziness" is not the same as when it was originally translated from the Latin, "acedia". A better contemporary English translation of the Latin is apparently "apathy."

I don't think it's possible to "dispose of" other peoples' thoughts or words...  However, I think they've missed something very important, and because of that I'm inclined to disagree with them.  I also think that your attitude is extremely dismissive of my failure to simply accept what was written.

Essentialism is alive and well, and embraced by plenty of "university types".  Aren't evolutionary psychologists "university types" themselves? 

We could, actually, have a discussion if you were inclined - but it looks like you were only looking for affirmation.  Pity.

I apologize, Timebandit, if my attitude was extremely dismissive.  I still do think, though, that it is quite rash to dismiss the value of Donald Capps, Judith Shklar and Mary Daly's work as "essentialist."   Maybe I misinterpreted that by your comment you were dismissing the value of their work.  Do you see any value in it?  It would be helpful for me if you would explain what you mean by "essentialism."

In the following link, there is another interesting take on deadly sins and the "seed of deep morality," from Jacob Needleman:

Why can't we be good?