<table> <tr><td><b>Vice</b></td><td><b>Virtue against which it sins</b></td><td><b>Brief description</b></td></tr> <tr><td>Pride (1) </td><td>Humility </td><td>Seeing ourselves as we are and not comparing ourselves to others is humility. Pride and vanity are competitive. If someone else's pride really bothers you, you have a lot of pride.</td></tr> <tr><td>Avarice/Greed (5) </td><td>Generosity </td><td>This is about more than money. Generosity means letting others get the credit or praise. It is giving without having expectations of the other person. Greed wants to get its "fair share" or a bit more.</td></tr> <tr><td>Envy (2) </td><td>Love </td><td>"Love is patient, love is kind…" Love actively seeks the good of others for their sake. Envy resents the good others receive or even might receive. Envy is almost indistinguishable from pride at times.</td></tr> <tr><td>Wrath/Anger (3) </td><td>Kindness </td><td>Kindness means taking the tender approach, with patience and compassion. Anger is often our first reaction to the problems of others. Impatience with the faults of others is related to this.</td></tr> <tr><td>Lust (7) </td><td>Self control </td><td>Self control and self mastery prevent pleasure from killing the soul by suffocation. Legitimate pleasures are controlled in the same way an athlete's muscles are: for maximum efficiency without damage. Lust is the self-destructive drive for pleasure out of proportion to its worth. Sex, power, or image can be used well, but they tend to go out of control.</td></tr> <tr><td>Gluttony (6) </td><td>Faith and Temperance </td><td>Temperance accepts the natural limits of pleasures and preserves this natural balance. This does not pertain only to food, but to entertainment and other legitimate goods, and even the company of others.</td></tr> <tr><td>Sloth (4) </td><td>Zeal </td><td>Zeal is the energetic response of the heart to God's commands. The other sins work together to deaden the spiritual senses so we first become slow to respond to God and then drift completely into the sleep of complacency.</td></tr> </table>

A 1998 Purdue University study concluded that church members were more likely to be overweight than other people. Southern Baptists were heaviest. ...Young admits the church has a long way to go. He sees people eating fatty foods at restaurants after church. "They'll say, 'Let's pray together, God, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies.' The deal is, they should have prayed before they ordered, 'God, help me order stuff that will glorify you.'" http://www.churchcentral.com/nw/s/template/Article.html/id/18549

Her neoligism: gloth - it's gluttony plus sloth

Our understanding of gluttony has shifted over the ages. We used to think of it as a sin which would condemn you to hell in the afterlife, and now we think of it as a flaw that will condemn you to hell on earth. We've traded the eternal perspective for a temporal one--and we barely even noticed.

<img src="http://glenandpaula.com/quotes/uploads/1109708978monty-seven-sins.gif" width="600" height="206" />

The mere fact of comfort foods is revealing. They comfort, they give succor, they help us to cope with disappointment. In fact, eating can become a substitute for relationships, for love, for success, for almost anything. We all know that to be true. So why are we so shocked that gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins?

Now that gluttony has become an affront to prevailing standards of beauty and health rather than an offense against God, the wages of sin have changed and now involve a version of hell on earth: the pity, contempt, and distaste of one's fellow mortals. What makes the glutton's penance all the more public and cruel is that gluttony is the only sin whose effects (in the absence of that rare and fortunate metabolism that permits the fruits of sin to remain hidden) are visible, written on the body.

For if, as they say, we are what we eat, then how we feel about eating--and eating too much--reveals our deepest beliefs about who we are, what we will become, and about the connections and conflicts between the needs of the body and the hungers of the spirit.

Here's the rule: Colossians 2.21 Here's the rationale: 1 Corinthians 11.22a Here's the only exception: Ezekiel 4.12,15 But here's the consequence: Proverbs 23.8a Colossians 2.21 (NIV) "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" 1 Cor 11.22a (NIV) "Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in?" Ezekiel 4.12 (NIV) "Eat the food as you would a barley cake; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel." Ezekiel 4.15 (NIV) "'Very well,' he said, 'I will let you bake your bread over cow manure instead of human excrement.'" Proverbs 23.8a (NIV) "You will vomit up the little you have eaten...