As you may aware, there has been some news that the Vatican is adding more mortal sins to Christianity. According to Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, this is done to prevent people from losing the notion of sin,
and to stress that If people do not confess regularly, they risk slowing their spiritual rhythm
. The new more-modernised and more-social sins include:
- Environmental pollution
- Genetic manipulation
- Accumulating excessive wealth
- Inflicting poverty
- Drug trafficking and consumption
- Morally debatable experiments
- Violation of fundamental rights of human nature
The original seven deadly sins are:
- Pride
- Envy
- Gluttony
- Lust
- Anger
- Greed
- Sloth
It can be seen that the new list try to target more specifically on what human can do only recently, where technology and money drive most of the human life.
Recently, a BBC report also mentioned about “progressive” muslim women in America. The report certainly put emphasises on how Muslim women in the states try to do more active role in practising Islam in their daily lives. But it also described the practises of putting the five prayers as secondary priority (while “remembering” God everyday gets higher priority), translating Quran (Islam’s Holy Book) in an unusual way, and allowing women to lead prayers, as “progressive Islam.” I certainly don’t have any problem with Muslim women to have a bigger and more active roles in the society, but the tendency of the news that somehow called, what I think, more observant Muslims as “traditionalists” make me a little bit uncomfortable.
I’ll admit and really stress that I’m not that religious, but this journey made me feel that I have to hold on to something in order not to lose my identity. I found that one of the things to hold on to, is my religion.
I don’t want to put my religious practise at the centre stage. What I want to do is ask these questions:
- Do you think religions need to be “modernised”?
- Don’t they have some general values that always be relevant?
- Should we behave in such a way to be not considered as old-fashioned/fundamentalists/traditionalists including changing the way we practise our religions?
To end this post I’m going to tell you that in the last several weeks, my door was knocked several times by young Greek man and woman. My conversations with them, which lasted around 15 minutes, are probably the longest ones I have with any Greek. They gave me pamphlets about their believes. They are Jehovah Witness’ Christians, and we’re discussing about religions at the footstep of my door. The guy invited me to have a coffee with him tomorrow at noon.
