Sloth - The Most Prevalent Sin In These Times

Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins.  It is "defined as spiritual or emotional apathy, neglecting what God has spoken." [1]  "Apathy is a state of indifference." [2]  In short, sloth is defined here as indifference to God.  This indifference encompasses but is not identical to what Pope Benedict XVI termed as "[t]he dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires..." [3]

Not recognizing God as absolute good and Satan as absolute evil are not prerequisites of the sin of indifference to God whereas they are prerequisites of "the dictatorship of relativism."  However, the sin of indifference to God does include within it the definition of "the dictatorship of relativism."  In other words, one who is indifferent to God can recognize God as the definitive Creator but chooses by his Free Will to ignore God, so much so that if he were to witness Christ's raising of Lazarus from the dead and the resurrected body of the crucified Jesus, he could care less.  He would have his own ideas of what life and world are about, focusing on his own ego and desires in a universe separate from and parallel to God's.

Arguably, therefore, that one who is indifferent to God is quite aware of God but considers himself not of God's creation, but a god himself, one who does not believe in miracles and cannot perform them, who cannot triumph over Satan but overlooks the Satan's works and takes them in stride, even when he and his loved ones become statistics of heinous crimes, and who is loved by Satan because he brings to life these deceitful words: "and you will be like God" [4] once uttered by the Serpent in the Garden of Eden to his first parents.

The self-fated creatures of sloth are everywhere, disappointed, saddened and embittered by the trials of life, not by their own volition but by circumstances and pervasiveness of evil over which they have no control.  They need compassion, not accusation; they need to be saved, not blamed; they need to be shown the path, not to be lectured. It is up to those who have been touched by the grace of God to help them heal their spirits broken by their individual pains, and lead them back to God so that they would have the strength to question their minds that have been distracted and dominated by evil.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth_%28deadly_sin%29
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apathy
[3] http://thinkexist.com/quotation/we-are-moving-toward-a-dictatorship-of-relativism/348264.html
See also http://keysofpeter.org/book/pope.htm
[4] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+3%3A5&version=NIV