 7 Deadly Sins & 7 Life Giving Virtures "God did not call us to impurity." The lust of the flesh is
a permanent element of man's fallen nature. Thomas Merton
believed that sexual appetites were the most difficult of all natural
appetites to control and tended to completely blind the human spirit of
all interior light. Because of lust, there is a strong tendency
for men and women to turn true, other-centered sexual love into a mere
self-centered satisfaction. Like all of the deadly
sins, lust has certain offspring such as blindness of mind or
perversion of heart, rashness, inconstancy, and inordinate self-love.
Lust invites us to close our eyes to our values, to harden our hearts
against the needs of others, to pursue genital pleasure for its own
sake without weighing the consequences, to focus so much on our own
satisfaction that other moral instincts are pushed aside. The deadly sin of lust is an offense against ourselves, other persons and society. Against ourselves; Lust
is a kind of slavery in which the person is in bondage to uncontrolled
passions and desires and fantasies. Lust is evil, remarks Karl
Menninger, not because it is about sex or pleasure, but because it
corrupts or destroys the personality of the participants. In
private many people testify that they are powerless over their sexual
urges and that they have sacrificed some of their most tender human
feelings because of the power of lust. Against other persons;
In lust I am concerned with the fulfillment of my own needs and
desires, with little or no thought being given to the needs, interests,
and desires of the other. This kind of focus on self is certainly
characteristic of many expressions of lust, such as rape, incest, and
pornography. Against society;
There is little doubt that the fruits of lust affect the social
fabric. We have a veritable epidemic of children born out of
wedlock, many of them to teenage girls. Countless other children
are destroyed through abortion. Against families and mates by
endless hours and dollars given over to the porn industry. Lastly, lust has a
dimension of cruelty to it. More often than not, lust is about
dominance and abuse. In its blind drive to satisfy itself, lust
takes advantage of the vulnerability or weakness or innocence of
others. Lustful people are seldom honest. They manipulate
and seduce others into a genital relationship, but they do not
necessarily love or even care about the other person as an
individual. Lust involves no real choice of a partner, nor does
it take responsibility for the consequences of its acts. (Tomorrow we will examine chastity as the answer to lust.) -thoughts taken from Choosing Virtue in a Changing World: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins Please Email Us With Any Comments or Feedback At ©2005 CopperCountry.com,Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. |
