Friday, October 5, 2007

Sinfully Good

You know, I don't think many things show the human fascination with evil better than the situation that exists between the seven sins and the seven virtues. Everyone knows the Seven Deady Sins (or at least knows of them), but I wonder how many people know their virtues. And I wonder what set of virtues they know, because that's another part of it. Their isn't even one dominant set of virtues, like there is is for the sins. It's just kind of like, "Eh. Whatever." I started thinking about all this thanks to Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series. As I mentioned before, the villains of this series are all afflicted with one of the Seven Deadly Sins. When I first stared reading this series, I thought it would make sense for each of the pieces of The Will that the main character, Arthur, frees to embody one of the seven virtues. But when I tried to match it up, it didn't work, so I gave up on the idea. Very recently, however, I discovered that I was using the wrong set of virtues for comparison. The ones I know are courage, purity, humility, honesty, diligence, charity, and fidelity. The ones that Nix uses are prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice (the four cardinal virtues), as well as faith, hope, and charity (the three theological virtues). And to make things even more confusing, while most of the time, when people are referreing to the Seven Virtues, they're speaking of the cardinal and theological virtues, there is another set of virtues called the Seven Heavenly (or Holy) Virtues, which are really just the exact opposites of the deadly sins. They're humility, liberality (generousity), brotherly love, meekness, chastity, temperance (moderation), and diligence. It's all very haphazzard and unorganized. Apparently we like our sins better ^_^ Also, on a completely unrelated note, Demetri Martin is now one of my favorite comedians. -Quotations of the Day- "Sometimes, when something really great happens to me, I like to wait two weeks before I tell anyone about it, because I like to use the word 'fortnight'." "I keep a lighter in my back pocket all the time. I'm not a smoker, I just really like certain songs." "I wrapped my Christmas presents early this year, but I used the wrong paper. See, the paper I used said 'Happy Birthday' on it. I didn't want to waste it so I just wrote 'Jesus' on it." "I like parties, but I don't like pinatas because the pinata promotes violence against flamboyant animals. Hey, there's a donkey with some pizzazz. Let's kick its ass. What I'm trying to say is, don't make the same Halloween costume mistake that I did." -Demetri Martin-

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