Yet straight-faced instruction about religion by militant unbelievers who wouldn’t know a tabernacle if it fell on them couldn’t abound more.
#YOUR CHRONICLE SLOTH HOW TO#
Faith, after all, is more like a muscle than an instinct it is only by exercising that most people can even begin to learn how to use it. How often is the refusal to attend religious services really a result of high-minded principle – and how often instead an unwillingness to get out of bed on Sunday morning, to leave the internet for no apparent purpose for even one hour a week, or to be bothered in any way at all from doing what “I” want to do with “my” time? One suspects that Sloth is similarly helpful to the spread of secularism itself. The recent revival of atheism also owes a hidden debt to Sloth. And it is Sloth, finally, that seduces us into shirking the public consequences of believing just what we believe – that tells us we should just give up, go along and get along like the rest of the folks, and put up with the fiercely held untruths of our time. It is Sloth that whispers into our willing modern ears, telling us to postpone marriage and childbearing till our careers are solid and we’re “financially stable.” Sloth is the voice confiding that other forms of human “union” – i.e., those without the rigors of real marriage – will be easier on us no matter what the Bible says.
Defined from Aquinas on down as “the desire not to be troubled by what God wants,” Sloth obviously dictates the shortcut of artificial contraception, for example, at least as much as Lust does. And Sloth plays a similar supporting role in other aspects of our moral disorder. Pornography and Sloth between them have induced in some men a state that their ancestors would have thought impossible: it has rendered them too lazy for real sex. The unprecedented rates at which pornography is devoured in states red and blue may be more commonly associated with the Deadly Sin known as Lust.
“Our technology and our gadgets have freed us from most drudgery,” as Henry Fairlie observed in his rich study, The Seven Deadly Sins Today, “and what do we do with the time that is now available to us? We turn inward and become utterly absorbed in ourselves.” All the more prescient, Fairlie penned these words in 1979 – i.e., even before every home in America was to acquire what has become for many a virtual shrine to Sloth at any given hour, namely an internet connection in the kitchen or living room.Ĭonsider also the critical role of Sloth in our modern sexual disarray. In truth, the signs of Sloth are everywhere in our lives. Show me a sin, deadly or otherwise, that you think is farthest away at any given time, and I’ll show you something breathing just over your shoulder with a pickax under its coat. Truly, have any people ever worked so much, or as far removed from the sin of Sloth, as we Americans today? Even the better-off are said to labor constantly, and at night visions of Blackberries dance in their heads. The country’s people, it is widely believed – including by them – are overworked, the more so as they navigate churning financial waters. Meanwhile, conservative America, this faction’s accustomed ally, is flat-out moribund, a gross object for dissection, with a thousand gloating obituaries buzzing daily around its head. One week after an election that has made national laughingstocks of many believers and their beliefs, much of Catholic America lies temporarily spent and despondent. What could possibly be more unwanted at this particular intense and critical political moment than a thumb-sucking reflection on – of all things - the Deadly Sin known as Sloth?
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