Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read Online Free Page A

O’Reilly.
    Interestingly, the seven deadly sins aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Bible, which may come as a surprise to some readers—it certainly came as a surprise to me. While I’d never run across the seven deadly sins while reading the Bible, I nevertheless assumed that the seven deadlies were in the Bible somewhere, perhaps in a psalm I’d somehow missed or the directors’ cut of the Sermon on the Mount. But the collective idea of the seven deadly sins, as it turns out, has its roots in the pre-Judeo-Christian era, and the sources for the tradition are not at all clear-cut. Most scholars believe the roots of the seven deadly sins lie in a conflation of Babylonian astronomy, which argued that the cosmos was a series of seven spheres with earth at the center, and the Greek belief that the soul descends from heaven, acquiring sin as it takes on a mortal body.
    The earliest list of seven sins appears in the Greek Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs: Testament of Reuben, supposedly written by Reuben, one of the twelve patriarchs of the tribes of Israel, around 106 B.C. Another list of deadly sins was drawn up by Horace, the Roman poet (65-8 B.C.), who ticked off eight mortal crimes or passions: avarice, desire, vanity, envy, wrath, sloth, drunkenness, and sensuality. It wasn’t until Evagrius of Pontus (d. ca. 400), an early Christian monk who lived in Egypt, made his list of eight cardinal sins that a list of non-biblical sins entered the Christian tradition. Evagrius served for a time as archdeacon of Constantinople before traveling to Jerusalem and then into the Nitrian Desert to become a hermit. It was a more gregarious monk, John Cassian (d. ca. 435), who brought Evagrius’s list from Egypt to Europe. In his De Institutos Coenobiorum (ca. 420), Cassian listed Evagrius’s eight sins: gluttony, lust, avarice, wrath, sadness, sloth, vainglory, and pride. (Fun fact: Cassian considered the first two sins, lust and gluttony, “natural,” since the existence of humanity depends, to some extent, on eating and fucking.)
    It was Saint Gregory the Great (Pope Gregory I, d. 604) who cut Evagrius’s eight cardinal sins down to seven, as he added envy to the list, eliminated vainglory, and merged sadness with sloth. But Gregory’s list of seven deadly sins—pride, anger, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, and lust—was unknown outside of monastic circles until the Catholic Church made confession mandatory in the early part of the thirteenth century. Parish priests in England were instructed to teach their parishioners about the seven deadly sins after 1231, in the hopes that their parishioners would have less to confess if they knew what to avoid. That was what transformed the seven deadly sins from a Dark Ages obscurity to pop culture phenomenon, insofar as pop culture existed in the thirteenth century.
    Got all that? Good. Now let’s do some sinnin’.

The Thrill of Losing Money
    Affluence brings with it boredom. Of itself, it offers little but the ability to consume, and a life centered on consumption will appear, and be, devoid of meaning. Persons so afflicted will seek sensation as a palliative, and that today’s culture offers in abundance.
    â€”Robert Bork
    C onsumption, sensation, meaninglessness—Robert Bork wasn’t writing about Las Vegas when he wrote those words, but he sure nailed the place.
    Before I ever set foot in Las Vegas—before I sipped my first foot-long margarita—I despised the place as much as or more than I assume Bork does. To me, Las Vegas was a place where cocktail waitresses went to die, where swag lamps swung, and where gangsters were gunned down midmassage. Elvis and Frank and Liberace may have left the building, but Vegas was still their cheesy town, not mine. Las Vegas was strip clubs and slot machines, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Robert Urich. Las Vegas was for people who lead lives centered on consumption, devoid of meaning.