# Humanities & Anthropology > Philosophy >  Seven Deadly Sins in Christianity vs. Seven Deadly Sins in Islam - Compared

## Tomenable

Such a video:

I found it interesting, it highlights differences in *moral codes* of these respective religions:

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## Angela

Was it necessary to double post this?

Regardless, my response is the same...

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...599#post484599

This is a seriously unhelpful analysis, in my opinion. The most important "sins", for a Christian, are those involved in breaking one of the Ten Commandments:

This is from the New Catholic Bible, which is really the same as the Old Catholic Bible. :)

"1. I, the Lord, am your God. You shall not have other gods besides me.

2. You shall not take the name of the Lord God in vain

3. Remember to keep holy the Lord's Day

4. Honor your father and your mother

5. You shall not kill

6. You shall not commit adultery

7. You shall not steal

8. You shall not bear false witness

9. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife

10. You shall not covet your neighbor's goods"

They are "lifted", if you will, from the Old Testament.
http://www.catholicbible101.com/thetencommandments.htm

From the New Testament:

"Matthew 22:36-40New International Version (NIV)

36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

As to Islam, this is an article on a letter sent by 138 Muslim scholars to the Pope.
http://www.acommonword.com/the-lette...stian-leaders/
"On coming to the content of the letter what is immediately striking is the fact that the title has been taken from the Koran: “A Common Word between Us and You” (_Sura of the family of Imran_, 3:64). This is what Mohammed says to the Christians in the Koran: when he sees that he cannot reach agreement with them, then he says: Come let us agree on at least one common ground: that we shall worship none but God (the oneness of God) “and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside God.”

Also,
"The structure of the letter is composed of three parts: the first is entitled “love of god”, subdivided into two, “love of god in Islam” and “love of god _as the first and greatest commandment_ in the bible”."

"The second part is entitled “love of the neighbour” (_hubb al-jâr_). Also subdivided in two: «love of the neighbour in Islam» and « love of the neighbour in the Bible». Where once again the original Arabic says “in the Gospel”."

How can it have escaped this so called analyst how similar the theology is, in broad terms? 

Of course, there are differences. Islam speaks really not of "love" of God, but of obedience, submission. There are other differences. Yes, the hadithas amplified upon it, and are a product of a different culture, a non-European culture. Likewise, the Talmud amplifies upon Jewish scripture and contains precepts not found in the Christian tradition. However, the similarities are profound. All three traditions are called "Religions of the Book", and all three are based on belief in ONE GOD, not many.

Have you ever read the Koran? I have, as part of a Comparative Religion course at university. I just re-read it a couple of years ago to try to get a handle on these things Huge swathes of it are lifted from the Old Testament and the New Testament. Mary is venerated, as is Jesus, as a great prophet. You should read it; you would find that a lot of it echoes what is in both the Old and the New Testaments.

I very much object to some of the demonization of all Muslims, all people from the Middle East really, that is going on in some quarters. If personal experience is any guide, I've found them as individuals to be almost universally warm, generous, engaging, and kind. Their religion formed them in almost all cases, and you couldn't meet better people. They shouldn't be treated less than respectfully because some of their brainwashed or mentally ill compatriots are wreaking havoc not only on us but on them as well. 

As others have said, however, the big difference is that the theology of both Judaism and Christianity, except in the more conservative branches, has moved on since the Middle Ages, while that of Islam as a whole has not, in my opinion. That doesn't mean that it can't or won't. Some of this can be laid at the feet of the Wahabi Saudis, who fund many, many madrassas all over the world which teach the most extreme and conservative form of Islam. 

One final point: could you please provide the link to the video? I want to check out the organization that is putting these videos out. We don't want this Board to become a dumping ground for deceptive, misleading propaganda by one hate group or another.

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## Tomenable

> could you please provide the link to the video? I want to check out the organization that is putting these videos out.


Apparently the organization is called *The Rationalists* (first link):

https://therationalists.org/2016/07/...slam-compared/

Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXa80iqZQqI

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## Angela

> Apparently the organization is called *The Rationalists* (first link):
> 
> https://therationalists.org/2016/07/...slam-compared/
> 
> Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXa80iqZQqI


Thanks. I can't see anything too objectionable, other than a profound lack of knowledge about all three of the "Religions of the Book", from my perspective. :)

For what it's worth, I'm the product almost entirely, until university and post university studies, of a rigorous Catholic education, which included one period a day of theology, five days a week, for all those years. I've joked about it, but I did indeed want to become a Carmelite. How's that for brainwashing? I thought my anti-clerical father would have a heart attack. :) 

I never lost my interest in it even if I strayed, so I also took the odd comparative religion and philosophy class in university. The only people I've ever heard talk about the "Seven Deadly Sins" are the "religious" themselves, those in holy orders. The vast majority of Christians couldn't even name them. For that matter, most of them would have a hard time naming the 10 Commandments, and have a hard time not breaking those. If normal people started describing all the times they broke one of the Seven Deadly Sins in a week, they'd be in the confessional for an hour each week. Only saints don't break those, and saints are in short supply.

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## bicicleur

> Thanks. I can't see anything too objectionable, other than a profound lack of knowledge about all three of the "Religions of the Book", from my perspective. :)
> 
> For what it's worth, I'm the product almost entirely, until university and post university studies, of a rigorous Catholic education, which included one period a day of theology, five days a week, for all those years. I've joked about it, but I did indeed want to become a Carmelite. How's that for brainwashing? I thought my anti-clerical father would have a heart attack. :) 
> 
> I never lost my interest in it even if I strayed, so I also took the odd comparative religion and philosophy class in university. The only people I've ever heard talk about the "Seven Deadly Sins" are the "religious" themselves, those in holy orders. The vast majority of Christians couldn't even name them. For that matter, most of them would have a hard time naming the 10 Commandments, and have a hard time not breaking those. If normal people started describing all the times they broke one of the Seven Deadly Sins in a week, they'd be in the confessional for an hour each week. Only saints don't break those, and saints are in short supply.


how did you keep up Angela?
and why did you get all that indoctrination if your father was so opposed to it?
oh, I see, you saw the light
and then something made you change your mind again

I got some indoctrination too - it just was like that at the time - but not as intense as you
and yes, I hated that and I've forgotten all about it, the deadly sins and the 10 commandments and all that
I don't think I'm a better or worse person because of that
I feel much more free without religion

well I see you're able to put things in perspective
and I appreciate your comments

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## bicicleur

P.S. I remember when I was a young boy, I had an aunt I didn't know so well.
When she was young she had run away from home to join a Carmelite convent in southern France, much against the will of my grandfather.
There she lived a very strict life and she got ill - meningitis or something like that - she survived but was left mentally unstable and sent back to a convent in Belgium.
My family was very angry and held the head of the Carmelite convent in southern France accountable for not properly taking care for my aunt causing the disease and the mental intability.

That are things that happened just a generation before mine.

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## Angela

> how did you keep up Angela?
> and why did you get all that indoctrination if your father was so opposed to it?
> oh, I see, you saw the light
> and then something made you change your mind again
> 
> I got some indoctrination too - it just was like that at the time - but not as intense as you
> and yes, I hated that and I've forgotten all about it, the deadly sins and the 10 commandments and all that
> I don't think I'm a better or worse person because of that
> I feel much more free without religion
> ...


Had we stayed in Italy it would have been the same. Religion was taught in all the schools, including the public schools, as I'm sure you know. When the time came, and if he were able to afford it, my father would have sent me to a convent school for the superior education, for the discipline, to make sure I became a "lady", with the more refined graces, and to keep me away from boys for as long as possible. :)

In the town to which we immigrated there was a Catholic girls' high school and one for boys. For both, you had to pass an entrance exam to get in. It's the same in many American towns. Not that the church educates only the middle class. They have a tremendous number of schools in poor inner city areas where even non-Catholic parents flock, because they are an oasis of calm, discipline and rigorous teaching.

Anyway, it was the next best thing, from my parents' perspective, to a convent school. The one for girls was run by an order from Montreal so there was a lot of emphasis on French language, literature, and culture, which my father also liked. The boys' school was run by the Christian Brothers, an Irish order who were very tough, and I mean tough. A boy who was dating one of my friends mouthed off to one of the Brothers, swore at him or something when reprimanded, and the brother punched him in the jaw, knocking him right to the ground. The parents were perfectly ok with it, as was the boy, really. It was a different time. All the nuns had to do was raise their voices or say they were disappointed in us, and most of the girls just dissolved into tears. They were two very separate worlds, meeting only at supervised "dances", with the Brothers and the Mothers ranged all along the walls. I honestly don't know how, given what was going on in the outside world, how other young people our age were behaving, they kept us so innocent.

The theology classes, like all the others, were very rigorous: Biblical archaeology, Church history, the writings of the great theologians of the Church like Augustine and Aquinas, but even delving into people like Teilhard de Chardin, Hans Kung, the Christian Existentialists. The nuns were sometimes out there on the verge of "heresy" from the point of view of the Church hierarchy. We were debating Liberation Theology when most of the world didn't even know what it was. Some of them were also of a more "mystical" turn of mind, so we read Thomas Merton, Hildegard of Bingen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as the Christian apologists like C.S.Lewis.

What my father hadn't reckoned with was that just as I strove to get a perfect score on every test, be the best at every piano or ballet recital, I was the type who would want to please the nuns who so loved and fussed over me, and please my mother too, by being the "best" possible Catholic, and who is a better Catholic than a Carmelite? 

However, luckily for his heart, by junior year some of the petty tyrannies of a quasi convent life, the distance between word and deed of some of the "religious", coupled with the lure of boys, put an end to my rather romantic desire to become a Carmelite. :) As the nuns would say, the flesh is weak...or powerful, depending on one's outlook.

By the middle of my university days I had left the Church. We had a sort of rapprochement when I had children, partly because of pressure from the community around me, but it didn't last. 

Our parting of the ways really had nothing to do with any intellectual disagreements for the most part. If I were to be a believer, I'd be a Roman Catholic, without question. It has to do with the fact, I suppose, that the world offends my sense of justice; I cannot accept the evil in this world, and I mean disease, suffering of all kinds, not just man made evil, and I cannot wrap my head around, or accept, that a loving God could or would permit it. That was both a general perception of the world and a reaction to personal tragedies in my own life. The nuns told me that was the sin of intellectual pride, the sin that got Lucifer booted out of heaven. So be it.

By the way, my father wasn't an atheist. His disagreements with the Church were mostly "political". It was the Church itself with which he had problems, in a way that most Americans don't understand. He wanted me to be a journalist, or a crusading lawyer and judge, righting the wrongs of the world, not some nun locked away in a convent praying and singing.

Oh, and indeed the Carmelites still pay far too little attention to their own physical needs, and that was even in my time, although by then the numbers had dwindled. There was a convent in our town where some of us used to go when I was in my teens, to hear Mass, or to say the Rosary.The sound of their voices singing plain chant from beyond the grate was other worldly. My father used to call them the "Holy Fools", and I understood what he meant, although it made me angry even after I had long given up any desire to join them. When their heating system broke, they didn't tell anyone about it, because they wanted to offer up their discomfort as a sacrifice for the world. They also had gotten much too abstemious in terms of food. It's only when they started getting very ill that the Bishop found out. This is what it was like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HLn...r5v60k&index=4

To be clear, I don't regret one moment I spent there. I got a top notch education, made wonderful friends, and learned moral precepts which I still hold. They were very good women by and large, even if they weren't perfect, and they imbued us with, in addition to everything else, a belief in ourselves as women, that we were as intelligent, as capable, as good at running the world as any man. Most of us former students stay in touch and hold reunions, and we believe we were very fortunate, in many ways, to have been in their care. If only the world followed the rules of conduct they followed it would be a much better place.

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## bancroft

I guess all of us are aware of those sins. We mostly fail in avoiding it.

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## bicicleur

I was a very happy boy till the age of 12. I had many friends and school was just a social event. After schoold you'd find us playing in the fields till dark. My teachers complained about my lack of attention in class, but I allways ended in the top 3.
My parents they loved me but what happened I never understood. I've heared them complaining many times about their youth in boarding schools and the priests and the nuns in these schools.
Yet a priest came from some small Catholic order who had a boarding school some 120 km from our home. He convinced them that it would be best for my education to send me there.
It was horrible. I came home 1 day every 3 weeks and I lost all contact with my former friends. There was an iron discipline and a hostile environment in this school. You had to follow a strict programm of activities and sleep 24 hours a day and there was very little occasion for recreation.
The food was terrible. We were obliged to drink a whole bowl of horrible soup every day at noon and for the rest we'd only eat when we were realy hungry. But every thursday there wer french fries, 4 bowls per table. Some would spit in the bowls so they would have all the french fries for themselves.
There was an examn to be admitted to this school. Afterwards I learned I had quite a reputation with some older students. I was the only one ever who got 100 % of the mathematical questions right. Yet in class I underachieved.
The 3rd year my oldest brother - who is 2 years younger than me - joined me in this school.
Together we could finally convince my parents to send us to another school after this year.
I spend 3 more years in another Catholic boarding school nearby where I came home every weekend.
But my school results didn't improve. I passed every year but barely.
The last year I wanted to become a civil engineer. I was called several times to the offices of the agency to advise students. They told me it was impossible. They talked to my parents.
Finally they let me go to university allthough they belived I'd never pass entrance examn. I studied in one week all methematics books I'd had for the last 6 years and I passed the examns.
At university I had very happy years and I passed every test, never hat to do a 2nd one and passed maxima cum laude.
The 6 years before I was verry unhappy.

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## Petros Houhoulis

> Was it necessary to double post this?
> 
> Regardless, my response is the same...
> 
> http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...599#post484599
> 
> This is a seriously unhelpful analysis, in my opinion. The most important "sins", for a Christian, are those involved in breaking one of the Ten Commandments:
> 
> This is from the New Catholic Bible, which is really the same as the Old Catholic Bible. :)
> ...


That's Sargon of Akkad, and this is who he is by comments of his detractors:

https://youtu.be/Y6qPfIKrruU

That's his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-y...NFpDrGM0diZOLA

...And I am a fan!

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## Angela

The only thing I know of his output is what was posted here, which reveals that he knows absolutely nothing about either Christianity or Islam. That, or he's deliberately engaging in distortion.

You're of course entitled to like anyone you choose. I personally prefer to read articles from people who have some freaking notion what the heck they're talking about.

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## Angela

> I was a very happy boy till the age of 12. I had many friends and school was just a social event. After schoold you'd find us playing in the fields till dark. My teachers complained about my lack of attention in class, but I allways ended in the top 3.
> My parents they loved me but what happened I never understood. I've heared them complaining many times about their youth in boarding schools and the priests and the nuns in these schools.
> Yet a priest came from some small Catholic order who had a boarding school some 120 km from our home. He convinced them that it would be best for my education to send me there.
> It was horrible. I came home 1 day every 3 weeks and I lost all contact with my former friends. There was an iron discipline and a hostile environment in this school. You had to follow a strict programm of activities and sleep 24 hours a day and there was very little occasion for recreation.
> The food was terrible. We were obliged to drink a whole bowl of horrible soup every day at noon and for the rest we'd only eat when we were realy hungry. But every thursday there wer french fries, 4 bowls per table. Some would spit in the bowls so they would have all the french fries for themselves.
> There was an examn to be admitted to this school. Afterwards I learned I had quite a reputation with some older students. I was the only one ever who got 100 % of the mathematical questions right. Yet in class I underachieved.
> The 3rd year my oldest brother - who is 2 years younger than me - joined me in this school.
> Together we could finally convince my parents to send us to another school after this year.
> I spend 3 more years in another Catholic boarding school nearby where I came home every weekend.
> ...


Gosh, I'm sorry to hear this, Bicicleur. It sounds like something out of Charles Dickens. No wonder it soured your outlook on it. That said, I doubt I would have liked any boarding school, much less horrible ones like these. I didn't even like moving away to go to university. I'm also not made for group living, another reason why I gave up on the Carmelites.

In terms of the academics, I don't think anyone performs very well when they're very unhappy. You might also have been a late bloomer though. Boys sometimes are like that in my experience. My brother was, for example. My parents despaired of him academically. Slowly, as he moved through high school things improved. Then he took what we call the SATS, and got virtually perfect scores. That changed everything and got him into an excellent engineering program at university despite the less than stellar grades. That was followed by advanced degrees at MIT. 

He can't explain it either. He was happy, involved in sports, with a lot of friends, but he just couldn't seem to settle down to his school work, especially compared to me, the workaholic. It seemed as if it all changed overnight. We joke about it sometimes, when we talk about our childhoods. He sometimes says he thinks his brain didn't "grow" or develop until his late teens.

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## Tomenable

In this book there are interesting remarks about Islam:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristes_Tropiques

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## davef

Interesting stuff

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## Tomenable



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## davef

@Angela
I don't think my brain started to grow until I was about maybe 21-23! I spent most of my childhood up until that point believing I was dumb and was diagnosed win ADHD by someone who isn't a pill pusher. Thinking was hard! I had a bogus SAT score (that was due to my hatred of math). Fast forward a number of years later and I was doing real well in college level math (got an A in calculus II and a B+ in algorithms for example) and would've had a virtually perfect score on the GRE if not for the stupid vocab section. 

People are different and not everyone develops at the same pace or a pace they "should".

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