The Roman Catholic Church has recognized some version of an enumerated list of mortal sins since at least the late 4th century when Evagrius Ponticus refined and taught a list of eight evil thoughts. Pope Gregory I revised the list a century or so later into an early form of the Seven Deadly Sins. The thirteenth century saw Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica written, wherein he compared the severity of those cardinal sins. And less than a century after that, the second part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, gave us the flavors of sins that has stuck through today.

The current list (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride) just seems to describe a Las Vegas vacation, but Dante’s seven (Superbia, Avaritia, Luxuria, Invidia, Gula, Ira, and Acedia, mnemonically recalled as SALIGIA) sound like some badass demons’ names. Or stripper names, maybe.

Through the different versions, lust and anger have held strong against change. No wonder sex and violence are everywhere — they’ve had a long time to build up social momentum! Sloth, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to make a career choice for a while. Originally designated acedia, it was more like religious apathy at the start. Gregory the Great decided that the duo of acedia and sadness should combine their efforts and that the latter would get the credit for their work. Depressing. Mr. Aquinas challenged Gregory’s ideas about how those sins should be ranked, but that didn’t stop Dante from ordering them the same way for the ascent out of Purgatory. At least Dante gave acedia the proper respect on his fourth terrace designed to exercise the slothful. That’s right, exercise.

Just because I’m not a Christian doesn’t mean that I disagree about the wrongness of those character flaws called sins. I just interpret them my own way. For instance, that insidious tendency towards non-productive behavior in all of us is what I call Sloth. I think that’s the worst of the mortal sins, not in effect, but in scope. All of the other listed sins require volition and movement, albeit for purposes with varying degrees of nefariousness. But at least they show action. At least they require pursuing a goal. Even if the goal is an unhealthy one, the fact of the pursuit opens the possibility of redirecting the pursuer toward a better destination. A victim of laziness displays no movement in any direction!

The Sloth continues not to move today. I don’t agree with people who automatically decry the television or computer as the definitive progenitors of couch potatoes. There is good to be found in all types of produced entertainment. Couch potato is a label best applied to people who don’t bother to search. The greatest problem with television and the internet is that they expose us to so much information that the curious mind may be struck by a paralysis of indecision.

In attempting this article alone, I would find myself wandering away from the writing when I realized that Dante had some interesting ideas, or when I found that the seven sins were often anthropomorphized through the past couple of centuries as villain characters in fiction, or when I discovered an essay by Thomas Pynchon about this same topic. Each of those tangents could have led me down a path of investigation, producing some interesting conclusions. If I were assigned a homework to investigate such topics, or if I were writing a book on any of those, then there would be obvious benefits from taking those directions–but I’m doing neither.

Games are another distraction. I don’t play games where I just virtually pick up a gun and kill someone. Well, I rarely do that. I’m generally taken in by games that stimulate my problem-solving abilities. Psychologists could tell you that by practicing figuring out the correct order of steps to take in a game in order to win a level quickly or score the highest, a gamesman can develop excellent analytic skills… That may be true, but beating a level of Super Mario Whatever faster won’t actually earn me a paycheck today. If only.

Today’s Sloth is insidious in that he takes the form of potentially productive pursuits — just not the pursuits you intend to follow. At the end of the day, Sloth and cohorts like Procrastination, Distraction, and Idle Curiosity (not to be confused with his sister, Directed Curiosity) can not only have prevented you from accomplishing worthwhile goals, they’ll leave you exhausted as well! I’m not impervious to their wiles. After all, I’ve been trying to write this article for a couple of weeks, now.

I would be remiss if I offered up this declaration of danger without posing some tips for safety. Here’s my best one: self-censor only AFTER you’ve written a few lines. In real life, that can be interpreted to mean that if you spend all your time just trying to resist distractions, you’ll find that costs you a great deal of effort with little reward. When you’re done resisting temptations to sloth, all you’ve accomplished is still nothing. Pursue those distractions just enough to get a taste and THEN redirect yourself. Instead of resisting TV and then staring at the dead set with longing, turn it on and channel surf until you get to something that you can safely use as background noise for a useful activity. News while folding laundry, for example. Instead of just declaring that you will stay off your computer, get on there and update your resume. Remember that movement can be redirected, but immobility cannot.

I hope this helps. I know that I’ve been a victim on numerous occasions. So, I write up this article as a warning to others on the internet: Beware! Here there be Sloth! Its name is blog.

Don’t misunderstand: I really do like Christmas. But as my essays should make clear, I am not a Christian, nor do I celebrate Christmas in a completely typical American fashion. I do like to share my happy holiday feelings with my friends and loved ones, and that sounds familiar so it could lead to confusion.

I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine wherein I pointed out that definitions, like histories, are decided by the majority over time. Once upon a time, if you looked up the word “gay” in a dictionary, all you would find is “lighthearted and carefree”, “cheerful or pleasant”, and “brightly-colored, showy”. When enough people used the word to mean “homosexual” from the 1930s to the 1960s, that definition began to be included in dictionaries, and eventually became the primary meaning.

Christmas is still defined as the Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, held on December 25th. So, if some church committee came to me and demanded that I write a retraction for all of my blogs on the basis that I had misused the name of their holiday… Well, I would probably ignore them, but I might admit that they had a valid point. That’s the reason why I keep pointing out that my views only apply to me.

If I tell you “Merry Christmas!”, then I’m attempting to communicate that to you with the hopes that you’ll understand my statement and be able to react in a positive way. Communication stems from building a structure out of a vocabulary, passing that structure to another being, and the other being deciphering the meaning of the statement by defining the original vocabulary used with the help of his own personal lexicon. If your lexicon doesn’t have a subordinate listing of Christmas as ‘Paul Roth’s Agnostic recognition of a time of the year when it is socially acceptable or emotionally advantageous to behave in a gregarious, compassionate, and excessively charitable manner, in a one month period focused on, but not centered around, December 25th’, then you can’t understand my statement. You might think I mean, “Hey, I’m a Christian and I’m attempting to force my beliefs upon you in a concealed attempt to evangelize my worldview to heretics by means of an apparent gesture of friendliness.” Or maybe I mean that I’ve been brainwashed into saying this every December so I just said it again.

The problem is, my words probably sound like yours. If you hear a french speaker proclaim “Joyeux Noel!”, then you might scramble to a translation dictionary to figure out what that meant, but you’re going to assume that you know what Merry Christmas means since you can find that in your own mental dictionary. If I were the sort of person that got labeled Politically Correct back when everybody was using that phrase, I might be concerned about this possibility of misinformation. As I am who I am, I really just care enough to make a blog entry about it, and this is really more for me and my friends than to change the world. Although, come to think of it, that approach does change the world on occasion.

When I say (or sing) Happy Holidays, I realize that I’m not interpreting this season as a time to revere a Holy Day. I also realize that whomever hears me, might do just that. I don’t celebrate this time of year for anyone else, though; I celebrate it for myself! When I give you Season’s Greetings, it’s because I want to share my happiness, not because I want to convince you to be happy with me. That would be nice, and if we were sharing happiness together, I might feel even better — but I don’t need that. I’m having a Merry Christmas on my own, with or without you.

My Christmas rarely involves prayer, never involves churches, and no longer involves family. My Christmas doesn’t have to be anything but mine. For that matter, anyone else’s Christmas doesn’t have to be anyone’s but her own. I hear people tell me to have Happy Holidays when they themselves are Jewish and I’m pretty sure that if they recognize anything around this time of year, it would be Hanukkah, but I don’t get riled up about it. When someone tells me to have a Blessed Day, that sounds a bit more like they are trying to push their god on me, but recent realizations have made me consider that’s an appropriate thing and I try to take that in stride as well. After all, whether my day is blessed or not is no reflection on the fact that the well wisher wanted to wish me well.

Here’s my point, and it’s an attempt to start another front in the war against Christmas (so that it’s a three front war: the war against Christmas, the war against the war against Christmas, and war against people warring for foolish reasons): Your holiday sentiments are yours. Other peoples’ sentiments are theirs. If you don’t like theirs, then don’t use them. If you want to argue for or against the legitimacy of Christianity, I applaud you for your determination, but responding to a wish for well-being is not the cue for it.

When someone wishes me a Blessed Day, I don’t tell them that I don’t believe in their God. I either say Thank You or just don’t say anything at all. I’ll question a person’s religious beliefs when they start evangelizing to me with the intent to convince me to join them or if someone asks me about mine. For today, I’ll pretty much tell everyone “Merry Christmas”, and it’ll mean that this is exactly what I’m trying to have. Sure, if anyone else views this whole topic the way I do, it would be great if theirs were merry, too. But I’ll let them have whatever type of December 25th they want.

So let’s try it out and see what happens: Merry Christmas!