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Sloth In Henry Fairlie's The Seven Deadly Sins Today

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“Change the channels for an hour or two”
Sloth (or Acedia), one of the 7 deadly sins in the Christian tradition, can be generally defined as physically and emotionally shirking one’s duties. Henry Fairlie, in “The Seven Deadly Sins Today”, says that Sloth is “a state of dejection” that gives rise to “sluggishness…a poisoning of the will” (Fairlie 113). It is this very state that Green Day describes so aptly in their debut single “Longview”.
Longview describes the life of the slothful person. In the first few lines the slothful person admits to himself, “I’m fucking lazy” (Armstrong). This general attitude pervades the entire song and the worst part of the slothful person in “Longview” is that he understands this is a dejected state of his own making. He is in “a house with unlocked doors” but knows that he has essentially “locked the door to my own cell” (Armstrong). This is consistent with Fairlie’s understanding of the Christian sin. In the same way the slothful person in the song locks himself away, so does sloth …show more content…

Failing to love a good according to its proper measures and failing to carry out corresponding obligations (sloth) can lead a person, as it does in the song, to seek another distraction, one that perhaps does not require anything of them. Instead of looking for a job, as his mother requests, the slothful person in “Longview” smokes, gets high, and masturbates. Getting high (in my experience at least) tends to contribute to a state of slothfulness and encourages the shirking of one’s obligations. The masturbation part however, seems to fall under another deadly sin, the sin of lust. Seeking sexual pleasures in the wrong sort of way and improperly loving persons as the man in “Longview” is doing appears to be a symptom of lust. In this way “Longview” shows the relation between sloth and lust and how easily one can lead to

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