Editor's Note:  We often introduce Citric Acid as "Orange County's unlikeliest literary arts journal." In an embrace of unlikelihood, we're pleased to surprise and delight even ourselves (!) by sharing three more entries from UCI Religious Studies Lecturer Dr. Joseph McKenna's unpublished lexicon, An Opinionated Dictionary of Religion.

Deadly Sins

In Christianity sin is a moral breach that affects the sinner's relationship with God.

Ancient and Medieval (Roman Catholic) Christian moral theologians were perspicacious enough to see that some sins were venial peccadilloes and other sins were mortal, deadly, and soul suffocating.

In an odd nod to the "perfect" number seven, they listed seven deadly sins.  Here they are.

One is pride. This is not intended to be a healthy self-regard that forwards all industry. This is excessive self-regard, beyond mere vanity; it's haughtiness, arrogance, and mismeasuring one's worth.

Two is envy. Envy is often confused with jealously, which is another matter entirely. Here's how to distinguish envy and jealousy: Envy involves two persons, jealously three. Envy occurs when one person desires (or hates) the happiness of another (or that which makes others happy). Jealously happens when one person desires the attention of a second person who is attending to a third person.

Three is anger.  It seems rash that anger would be maligned as deadly, since it is a common enough emotion. But maybe the ancients had in mind the places where anger leads: resentment, indifference, and the retaliatory cold hard slap across the face.

Sloth is Four.  Inactivity. Either the body must be in motion or the mind quickened with thought. One must engage in physical or intellectual labor. To do nothing is contrary to your constitution.

Five is avarice (old-fashioned greed). There's some overlap here with envy but avarice implies the particular poison of money-loving acquisitiveness. 

Six is gluttony, gormandizing, regular and extreme consumption of (good) food and (better) wine.

Seven is lust of the sexual variety, even masturbatory fantasy.

Review the list and you'll see that desire is considered to be humanity's fatal flaw. Desire figures in all seven sins: desire for self (pride), desire for what others have (envy), desire to retaliate (anger), desire to be left in idleness (sloth), desire for wealth (avarice), desire for food and drink (gluttony), desire for sex (lust).

Here, it seems, is the abridged and sole Deadly Sin: Desire.

The trouble is, desire propels the entire apparatus of sentient being, from the worm to the mathematician. The very fuel that drives the vehicle simultaneously breaks it down.

Evil

Evil is a problem in many religions but not all.  For some religions, evil is only evil in appearance, not in reality.  If you were watching a stage play of Shakespeare’s Othello or  his Titus Andronicus, the villainous Iago and the even more deeply villainous Aaron are evil only insofar as they are necessary to the plot. The evil within these plays is holistic, merging seamlessly with the good to create dramatic dynamism. And so a Taoist might say evil only provides a necessary contrast to good, and as such the evil thing is in itself actually good. Even some theists have said as much.

 (I wonder if a starving and wounded child could draw comfort from this theory of evil?)

Evil is not a problem in dualist theism. For dualist theism, which believes in two Gods of equal strength, one all-good God and one all-evil God, evil is not a problem. The all-good God cannot be expected to eradicate evil, and this is why evil endures. Ancient Zoroastrianism and devil-believing religions like Christianity and Islam come close to this.

For other forms of theism, evil is indeed a problem. Why should an all-good God who is also all-powerful permit evil? Something doesn’t add up here. 

An all-good God would want to do away with evil, and the fact that this all-good God doesn’t do away with evil suggests this God is not all-powerful.

On the other hand, an all-powerful God has the power to erase evil, and the fact that this God does not erase evil must mean that this God is not all-good.

A flotilla of arguments called theodicies arose through the centuries purporting to demonstrate why the godly predicates all-good and all-powerful can be retained in the face of evil. The very existence of this fleet of parchment and paper argumentation suggests the "problem" of evil is accepted as such, as a problem. And the problem has never been adequately solved.

All religions possess strategies to overcome human evil. Opposite-than-evil virtues are enumerated. Meditation and prayer techniques are proffered. Human evils are targeted and harangued by gifted preachers.

As to natural evils like flood, famine, fire, earthquake, typhoon, tsunami, and a thousand different pathogens living to take your life, religions offer only the identification and pacification of supra-mundane culprits, like genies, fallen angels, ghosts, devils, and sometimes even a God or two.

How did modern English come to render evil as the word live spelled backwards, inasmuch as Old English yfel does not twist into Old English lifan? Our modern word "evil" has the hint of a definition within its very own script: two consonants and two vowels assembled and reassembled into aggressively conflicting binary opposites. Evil is all that opposes life.

Feng Shui

The words feng shui in Chinese mean literally wind and water, though it's anyone's guess how wind and water link to the ancient custom of geomancy, which is what Feng shui is.

Geomancy is the practice of arranging items in their best possible locations and positions. Should this village go here or further down the road over there? Should the buildings of the village face north or south or west or east? Should the gravesite for the villagers be near the hill or the river? Should the table in our house be centered in the room or off to the side? Should the flowers in the pot lean left to capture incoming light or right to be shielded in the shade of the banyan tree?

In once sense Feng shui is pure aesthetics, the art of putting objects in places most appealing to the eye.  In another sense Feng shui is pure pragmatics, putting things where they are most useful or near to what is useful.

We might now hazard a guess as to the meanings of the words wind and water. Ancient artisans laid out villages and buildings with a view to their proximity to drinking water and with an understanding of prevailing winds that might either cool or freeze hut owners.

Feng shui might have begun in such practicalities six thousand years ago, but eventually it evolved into (merged with) Chinese religious theories of aligning oneself with the power of chi by aligning everything in one's world with power of chi. Chi is the all-pervasive energy that envelops the universe. Harmony with chi brings health and happy relationships.

Feng shui thus shifted from being the prerogative of engineers and proto home decorators to being the exclusive privilege of the Taoist and Neo-Confucian sacerdotal class, who turned Feng shui into a ritual and a science at the same time, both of which gave it an air of mystique.

The priests devised special tools whereby they ascertained various forces at work in a given space, and after numerous calculations and incantations, they offered their advice.

A few late-twentieth-century well-heeled Westerners who had become overwhelmed by household clutter paid sizeable sums of money to have their mess rearranged in Feng shui stylings.

This well illustrates how a religious custom may change over the centuries, beginning in practicality, morphing into high magic and spiritual necessity, and finally in an utterly alien setting transforming itself into an elite suburban conceit.

Dr. Joseph McKenna has been teaching religious studies at UC Irvine since 1999.