What's your Sin??

I asked my kid what she thought of the recent BBC poll that showed the seven deadly sins are out of date. “What’s a sin?” she asked. Miserable pleasure seekers!

According to the BBC’s Heaven & Earth Show, which last month conducted a survey on the current status of the seven deadly sins, my kid isn't the only one whose immortal soul is in peril. (And yes, children, that does mean you’re busted.) Adults, too, are increasingly unwilling to throw stones – or are increasingly inaccurate at it (which I suppose is the next best thing).

Most of us, the survey found, no longer condemn sins like sloth, gluttony and lust. On the contrary. We aspire to them. And as for pride, envy, anger and greed, well shoot, you’ve got to vote for somebody. Anger is evidently the sin most adults commit most often. I know I do – especially when prevented from committing the others often enough. But nine per cent of people polled insisted they had never succumbed to any of the deadly sins or, if they did, they didn’t inhale.

Not surprisingly, today’s adults have become particularly (vi)aggro about calling lust a sin. (Face it, what other deadly sin attracts the pharmaceutical benefit?) Four in ten men nominated lust as the sin they would most enjoy indulging in. (Sluts!) The remaining six in ten disagreed. (Liars!)

A quarter of women also gave first preference to lustful desires, though almost as many – 20 per cent – admitted they were more aroused by binge-eating. Honestly, girls! Haven’t you ever heard of having your beefcake and eating it, too?

These days, people think cruelty is the worst sin we can commit. Yet it’s a vice that doesn't even appear on the original to-don’t list, drawn up in the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great (who incidentally ranked pride at the top of the charts . . . shame about the funny hat and the infallibility).

By tradition, each sin was also associated with a specific punishment in hell: dismembered alive, smothered in fire and brimstone, forced to cover schoolbooks for all eternity, etcetera.

Sadness was also on the original list – finding an appropriate penance must’ve been a bitch – and it wasn’t until the 17th century that church officials replaced it with sloth. Hey, they were getting around to it, okay?

In 2001, according to Le Monde, French master baker Lionel Poilance went so far as to lobby the Vatican to get the sin of gluttony re-classified (as what? a hobby?) before dying in a helicopter crash two years ago. Sorry, Lionel. But we told you it was deadly.