My mother and the nieces and I were sitting in the kitchen eating French toast.

[conuly]

And as we were eating, I suggested that they go to the park after. They all declined due to pure laziness (seriously, that was their reason), so I pointed around the table decrying sloth. Well, we all do that, right?

So Eva asked what sloth means, and this launched the two adults into a discussion of the seven deadly sins, with a tangent into the seven wonders of the world.

We kept missing one sin (pride, it turns out), but the nieces were really astonished with the concept of "wrath" being a deadly sin. "How can being angry be a sin?" they asked. "What if somebody does something really bad, shouldn't you be upset at them?" "That's just ridiculous!" "What, seriously, you can't be angry if people hurt you?"

They were similarly skeptical of "gluttony", though "envy" made perfect sense to them. I'm not sure what they'd think of "pride".

Comments

[siderea]

Heh, good on them.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

"What, seriously, you can't be angry if people hurt you?"

Yes, you can. "Wrath" isn't just plain old getting angry and yelling at someone who hurt you. "Wrath" is letting the anger fester and hating the other person forever, possibly turning to actions that are intended to hurt the other person right back and/or destroy their life. Declaring that "sinful" is probably a relatively wise move...
"Gluttony" makes perfect sense, too, considering that if one person shamelessly overeats, there are probably a lot of people starving on the other side of things. And again, it's not the occasional "overeating during Christmas dinner" sort of "eating more than your fill". It's all about the extremes - not about moderate shades of less-than-perfect behaviour.