The Twelve Cardinal Sins
The mission of UU A Way Of Life is to improve spiritual health, reduce immoral and sinful behavior, and work across systems for positive societal change. “Sinful” in the context of the UU A Way Of Life mission statement is defined as mistaken. The mission statement could read, “reducing immoral and mistaken behavior” but the mistakes being referred to are ones that cause spiritual injury and so we use the word “sinful.”.
“Cardinal sins” are major sins. They are the categories for types of sins and within each category there could be many sins enumerated. In describing the cardinal sins we are attempting to describe the category of mistakes which cause harm, suffering, and death whether psychological, social, spiritual, or physical.
Click on the link to take you to a description of each of the twelve categories which are juxtaposed to the components of spiritual health.
- Destructive management of fear
- Meanness
- Blaming, attack, and vengeance
- Separation, enhancement of the ego
- Conditional love, indifference, abandonment
- The unexamined life
- Individualism instead of interdependence
- Slavery, and acedia
- Blaming and victimhood
- Being fake and phoney
- Taking the world of the ego seriously
- Certainty, the need to be right, arrogance
In the pursuit of spiritual health not only do the components of spiritual health need to be nurtured and practiced to be strengthened, but the cardinal sins need to be recognized, acknowledged, and managed with the intent to diminish or eliminate their influence on one's life.
If you can't name the sin you cannot manage it. If you can't name it and manage it, forgiveness is not achievable because you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again.
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