January 21, 2026 • 11 mins
The Seven Deadly Sins are tied to religion, but not really in the Bible. So where did this naughty list come from?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh. Jerry's
here for Dave, and we're talking today about the Seven
Deadly Zins.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Seven Deadly Zens.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Did I say zens?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's a wine brand?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
It is? I was thinking it's pretty bold to label
your wine as deadly.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Uh yeah, good point. Never thought about that.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
But I think what they're I think they're able to
because the Seven Deadly Sins are so widely known, Yeah,
that people don't normally stop and think it says deadly
on this wine label because they know that they're talking
about something else.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It's a pretty widespread thing if you've seen the movie
seven obviously very prominent in that it's just a big
thing in pop culture. It was even a sort of
interpretation of Gilligan's Island, which I had never really been
too acquainted with.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Oh you haven't. It's a fan theory.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah, that apparently Sherwood Schwartz is kind of in some ways,
but that the Professor is Pride, and of course we're
also going over the list of the Sins with this list.
Professor is Pride, the Skipper is Anger or Wrath, Ginger
obviously lust, mister Howell obviously agreed, missus Howell. Gluttony and
partially sloth is what this says, Marianna is ENVM. Then
(01:20):
of course Gilligan is sloth, and he's the one that
is keeping them trapped on the island through his sloth.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, there are some really great fan theories around Gilligan's Island,
not just that one.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, I love that stuff. It's fun.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
I do too. But yeah, that's the Seven Deadly Sins,
the Skipper and the rest that They haven't always been
called the Seven Deadly Sins, and as a matter of fact,
seven is a trimmed down version of the original eight.
They've been called everything from the capital vices, cardinal sins,
capital sins, Yeah, vice sins. I think if you want
(01:56):
to combine everything together, and the Roman Catholics are nut
for this kind of stuff. And over the centuries, as
the Church has evolved, the whole things has kind of
been whittled down or changed. There have been different names.
I think Pride used to be called Van Gloriousness or
van glory instead of sloth. They had melancholy like basically,
(02:20):
don't be sad. But regardless of how totally associated it
is with Catholicism, and Christianity in general. It actually doesn't
appear in the Bible.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, that's right, by the way, I think Vanglory it's
probably already a band name, but that would be a pretty.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Good band name, metal for sure.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Oh yeah, absolutely, unless it's yeah, oh yeah, or I
was gonna say, probably like a Nickelback type of thing,
maybe whatever that is, whatever kind of music that is.
I don't even know what category that is.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I don't either, poor Nickelback, but I think they were
one of like the richest bands on the planet.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Oh, I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Anyway, Vanglory coming to a theater near you or a
concert venue near you.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Okay, but you could also call it theater. I'm getting sidetracked.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Speaking of theaters. Everyone should should go out and get
tickets for our live tour this year, right, Oh good.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
One, chuck. Yeah, you can get tickets on stuff youshould
know dot com. All the links are up there. We're
going to Denver, We're going to Seattle, We're going to
San Francisco. In April, we're going to Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, Akron, Ohio,
and then we're doing a whole tour of every single
city with a population over five thousand in Canada.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
That's not true. We're sorry.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
We couldn't go everywhere in Canada, but we did our best.
Some theaters on the East coast didn't work out, but
we tried everybody.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, I think we're doing six six cities though, which
is yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
To be fun.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, can't wait. Yeah, but go grab Tickets's gonna be fun.
Happy to be back out on the road and back
to the Seven Deadly Sins. I believe he said, if
you look in the Bible, you're not going to find them,
and that's because they're not really in the Bible, the
original sin when you know, Old Adam and Eve there
in the Garden of Eden in that book were described
as disobeying God and establishing the sinful nature of humanity.
(04:08):
But there's not a list of like the Ten Commandments
are in there, but the seven Deadly sins are not
in there. The Seven Deadly Sins came to be because
of a particular writer who was a monk in three
forty five CE name Evagrius Ponticus.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Which means Evan the Pontiac in English. Oh okay, according
to me, at least that's right.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
But he was the guy that gets credit basically as
the first person to kind of write these things out
and get it out en mass.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, but he had eight of them, the eight evil thoughts.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
He was a theologian, a monk who really put his
money where his mouth is. The last several years of
his life he went out and wandered around the desert
in Egypt and lived on herbs and barley. Essentially, he prayed,
he fasted, he meditated, He did his best to not
think any unholy thoughts. I'll bet that was more difficult
(05:04):
than you'd think. And he wrote a bunch of this
stuff down in the Anti Reticus, which is his celebrated
master work. And this is where the eight evil thoughts
first appear.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
That's right, gluttony, lust, and of course we're not talking
just sexual lust here. It's kind of leslie desires for
worldly things. Greed, which was avarice at the time, Anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory,
and pride are all in there.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah. And although we now think of the seven deadly
sins is applying to everybody, that's not at all what
Evan was doing at first. He basically was creating this
list of what to avoid if you're a monk. Essentially,
that's who would applied to initially.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Yeah, like, if you really want to walk the walk
like me, these are the things you need to avoid.
And I promise I'm not thinking of him. I'm just
writing about them.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
You want to take a break, Yeah, okay, we're gonna
take a break.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Just like the number of stars the sky was so much.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Stop all right, chuck. So, Evagrius Pontikiss basically created these
(06:34):
seven Deadly Sins or eighth Deadly Sins as a roadmap
for monks. Uh. And then some other people came along
a couple of centuries later like this is great, Like
how can we upscale this and really get the most
out of it in our corporate world? And one of
the first people to do this was Saint Gregory the Great,
who later became No. I guess probably first was Pope
(06:57):
Gregory the First.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, oh, and he became sainted later.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
It has to be. I don't think anybody's ever been sainted. Yeah,
you can't be sainted while you're alive, because you have
to perform at there's two miracles after your death.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah that's right, boy, you really remember that stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I knew, I do remember some of it.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, nice work.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
So Pope Gregory, the first before he was a pope,
wrote his master work and it was basically sort of
a real dissection of the Book of Job called Moraleia
and Job. And it was a very influential book. And
this is where his seven principal vices were laid out.
And we're not going to read all the sort of
(07:43):
gobbedy book, but it was you know, vanglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony,
and lust and then sort of deeper definitions of what
all those meant back then.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, and like all the terrible behaviors that come out
of it, right, so like like like reveling in your
neighbor misfortune kind of thing, like like these are what
you want to avoid, right. And a few centuries after that,
in the medieval era, other Christian writers that come like
Thomas Aquinas really latched onto this. They're like this is great,
(08:16):
Like why didn't we think of this stuff earlier? And
one of the things that kind of became popular to
get this across as a conception is called the Tree
of Vices. It's an icon with pride as the root
of this tree and then the rest of this deadly
sins kind of coming off as branches, and it became
very familiar because you would paint this on the wall
(08:39):
of your church somewhere. The reason you were painting it
on the wall of the church is because you had
to confess these particular kind of sins at least once
a year and then do whatever penance the local priest
told you to do for them, or if you didn't
do that, they're deadly because they were deadly for your
mortal soul, and after that you would after you die,
(09:03):
you would go to hell. That's why they're called deadly sins.
Not like they kill you here on earth, they kill
you spiritually after you die. So to confess those sins, though,
you had to know what they were, and that's why
they would paint the tree of vices on the church wall.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, that, for some reason struck me as funny. It
was the fourth Ladder in Council in twelve fourteen, where
the you know, you got to confess two times a year.
That's where that came from. And I just love the
idea of people are like, well, all right, what are
the sins? And I'll let you know if I did
any of them.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That's right. That Yeah, you just go up and like
trace your finger and be like, oh, okay, yeah, I
guess I did that. I did revel in my neighbor's
mis fresh and that time you stepped into a bear trap.
Oh my god, I thought that was hilarious.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
The Germans would have a name for that one day.
So people were pretty obsessed, you know, during the Black
Death of what happened after you die? That's I mean,
people were already heaven, hell, what's in a brand new thing?
But that's when it was like people are dying all
over the place and like where are we going, Like
we're really kind of worried about this. So it became
very ubiquitous talking about sins, talking about life after death.
(10:08):
Sermons became obsessed with it. It was in the Canterbury
Tales in the form of the Parsons Tale, and so
it was just kind of really latched on the Seven
Deadly Sins in particular as kind of the hot thing
in Catholicism.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, and it's still around in Catholicism. Apparently in two
thousand and eight, the Catholic Church, we're like, hey, we've
updated some more seven Deadly Sins for the aughts. I
guess that's probably how they put it. Genetic modification is one, Yeah,
carrying out experiments on humans, Okay, polluting the environment all
(10:44):
behind that, causing social injustice, sure, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy. Yeah,
and then of course taking drugs. Yeah, it didn't seem
like a deadly sin. Yeah, well you know they were
on a roll.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Those are the seven modern deadly sins? Is that how
they're framing it.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
That's what they tell me at the vatkue fantastic. Well,
I guess that's about it. Go forth and look out
for the seven deadly sins. I guess, yeah, don't do those. Yeah,
short stuff? Is that stuff you should know? Is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
(11:24):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh. Jerry's
here for Dave, and we're talking today about the Seven
Deadly Zins.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Seven Deadly Zens.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Did I say zens?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's a wine brand?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
It is? I was thinking it's pretty bold to label
your wine as deadly.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Uh yeah, good point. Never thought about that.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
But I think what they're I think they're able to
because the Seven Deadly Sins are so widely known, Yeah,
that people don't normally stop and think it says deadly
on this wine label because they know that they're talking
about something else.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It's a pretty widespread thing if you've seen the movie
seven obviously very prominent in that it's just a big
thing in pop culture. It was even a sort of
interpretation of Gilligan's Island, which I had never really been
too acquainted with.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Oh you haven't. It's a fan theory.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah, that apparently Sherwood Schwartz is kind of in some ways,
but that the Professor is Pride, and of course we're
also going over the list of the Sins with this list.
Professor is Pride, the Skipper is Anger or Wrath, Ginger
obviously lust, mister Howell obviously agreed, missus Howell. Gluttony and
partially sloth is what this says, Marianna is ENVM. Then
(01:20):
of course Gilligan is sloth, and he's the one that
is keeping them trapped on the island through his sloth.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, there are some really great fan theories around Gilligan's Island,
not just that one.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, I love that stuff. It's fun.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
I do too. But yeah, that's the Seven Deadly Sins,
the Skipper and the rest that They haven't always been
called the Seven Deadly Sins, and as a matter of fact,
seven is a trimmed down version of the original eight.
They've been called everything from the capital vices, cardinal sins,
capital sins, Yeah, vice sins. I think if you want
(01:56):
to combine everything together, and the Roman Catholics are nut
for this kind of stuff. And over the centuries, as
the Church has evolved, the whole things has kind of
been whittled down or changed. There have been different names.
I think Pride used to be called Van Gloriousness or
van glory instead of sloth. They had melancholy like basically,
(02:20):
don't be sad. But regardless of how totally associated it
is with Catholicism, and Christianity in general. It actually doesn't
appear in the Bible.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, that's right, by the way, I think Vanglory it's
probably already a band name, but that would be a pretty.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Good band name, metal for sure.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Oh yeah, absolutely, unless it's yeah, oh yeah, or I
was gonna say, probably like a Nickelback type of thing,
maybe whatever that is, whatever kind of music that is.
I don't even know what category that is.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I don't either, poor Nickelback, but I think they were
one of like the richest bands on the planet.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Oh, I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Anyway, Vanglory coming to a theater near you or a
concert venue near you.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Okay, but you could also call it theater. I'm getting sidetracked.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Speaking of theaters. Everyone should should go out and get
tickets for our live tour this year, right, Oh good.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
One, chuck. Yeah, you can get tickets on stuff youshould
know dot com. All the links are up there. We're
going to Denver, We're going to Seattle, We're going to
San Francisco. In April, we're going to Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, Akron, Ohio,
and then we're doing a whole tour of every single
city with a population over five thousand in Canada.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
That's not true. We're sorry.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
We couldn't go everywhere in Canada, but we did our best.
Some theaters on the East coast didn't work out, but
we tried everybody.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, I think we're doing six six cities though, which
is yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
To be fun.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, can't wait. Yeah, but go grab Tickets's gonna be fun.
Happy to be back out on the road and back
to the Seven Deadly Sins. I believe he said, if
you look in the Bible, you're not going to find them,
and that's because they're not really in the Bible, the
original sin when you know, Old Adam and Eve there
in the Garden of Eden in that book were described
as disobeying God and establishing the sinful nature of humanity.
(04:08):
But there's not a list of like the Ten Commandments
are in there, but the seven Deadly sins are not
in there. The Seven Deadly Sins came to be because
of a particular writer who was a monk in three
forty five CE name Evagrius Ponticus.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Which means Evan the Pontiac in English. Oh okay, according
to me, at least that's right.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
But he was the guy that gets credit basically as
the first person to kind of write these things out
and get it out en mass.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, but he had eight of them, the eight evil thoughts.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
He was a theologian, a monk who really put his
money where his mouth is. The last several years of
his life he went out and wandered around the desert
in Egypt and lived on herbs and barley. Essentially, he prayed,
he fasted, he meditated, He did his best to not
think any unholy thoughts. I'll bet that was more difficult
(05:04):
than you'd think. And he wrote a bunch of this
stuff down in the Anti Reticus, which is his celebrated
master work. And this is where the eight evil thoughts
first appear.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
That's right, gluttony, lust, and of course we're not talking
just sexual lust here. It's kind of leslie desires for
worldly things. Greed, which was avarice at the time, Anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory,
and pride are all in there.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah. And although we now think of the seven deadly
sins is applying to everybody, that's not at all what
Evan was doing at first. He basically was creating this
list of what to avoid if you're a monk. Essentially,
that's who would applied to initially.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Yeah, like, if you really want to walk the walk
like me, these are the things you need to avoid.
And I promise I'm not thinking of him. I'm just
writing about them.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
You want to take a break, Yeah, okay, we're gonna
take a break.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Just like the number of stars the sky was so much.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Stop all right, chuck. So, Evagrius Pontikiss basically created these
(06:34):
seven Deadly Sins or eighth Deadly Sins as a roadmap
for monks. Uh. And then some other people came along
a couple of centuries later like this is great, Like
how can we upscale this and really get the most
out of it in our corporate world? And one of
the first people to do this was Saint Gregory the Great,
who later became No. I guess probably first was Pope
(06:57):
Gregory the First.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, oh, and he became sainted later.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
It has to be. I don't think anybody's ever been sainted. Yeah,
you can't be sainted while you're alive, because you have
to perform at there's two miracles after your death.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah that's right, boy, you really remember that stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I knew, I do remember some of it.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, nice work.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
So Pope Gregory, the first before he was a pope,
wrote his master work and it was basically sort of
a real dissection of the Book of Job called Moraleia
and Job. And it was a very influential book. And
this is where his seven principal vices were laid out.
And we're not going to read all the sort of
(07:43):
gobbedy book, but it was you know, vanglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony,
and lust and then sort of deeper definitions of what
all those meant back then.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, and like all the terrible behaviors that come out
of it, right, so like like like reveling in your
neighbor misfortune kind of thing, like like these are what
you want to avoid, right. And a few centuries after that,
in the medieval era, other Christian writers that come like
Thomas Aquinas really latched onto this. They're like this is great,
(08:16):
Like why didn't we think of this stuff earlier? And
one of the things that kind of became popular to
get this across as a conception is called the Tree
of Vices. It's an icon with pride as the root
of this tree and then the rest of this deadly
sins kind of coming off as branches, and it became
very familiar because you would paint this on the wall
(08:39):
of your church somewhere. The reason you were painting it
on the wall of the church is because you had
to confess these particular kind of sins at least once
a year and then do whatever penance the local priest
told you to do for them, or if you didn't
do that, they're deadly because they were deadly for your
mortal soul, and after that you would after you die,
(09:03):
you would go to hell. That's why they're called deadly sins.
Not like they kill you here on earth, they kill
you spiritually after you die. So to confess those sins, though,
you had to know what they were, and that's why
they would paint the tree of vices on the church wall.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, that, for some reason struck me as funny. It
was the fourth Ladder in Council in twelve fourteen, where
the you know, you got to confess two times a year.
That's where that came from. And I just love the
idea of people are like, well, all right, what are
the sins? And I'll let you know if I did
any of them.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That's right. That Yeah, you just go up and like
trace your finger and be like, oh, okay, yeah, I
guess I did that. I did revel in my neighbor's
mis fresh and that time you stepped into a bear trap.
Oh my god, I thought that was hilarious.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
The Germans would have a name for that one day.
So people were pretty obsessed, you know, during the Black
Death of what happened after you die? That's I mean,
people were already heaven, hell, what's in a brand new thing?
But that's when it was like people are dying all
over the place and like where are we going, Like
we're really kind of worried about this. So it became
very ubiquitous talking about sins, talking about life after death.
(10:08):
Sermons became obsessed with it. It was in the Canterbury
Tales in the form of the Parsons Tale, and so
it was just kind of really latched on the Seven
Deadly Sins in particular as kind of the hot thing
in Catholicism.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, and it's still around in Catholicism. Apparently in two
thousand and eight, the Catholic Church, we're like, hey, we've
updated some more seven Deadly Sins for the aughts. I
guess that's probably how they put it. Genetic modification is one, Yeah,
carrying out experiments on humans, Okay, polluting the environment all
(10:44):
behind that, causing social injustice, sure, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy. Yeah,
and then of course taking drugs. Yeah, it didn't seem
like a deadly sin. Yeah, well you know they were
on a roll.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Those are the seven modern deadly sins? Is that how
they're framing it.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
That's what they tell me at the vatkue fantastic. Well,
I guess that's about it. Go forth and look out
for the seven deadly sins. I guess, yeah, don't do those. Yeah,
short stuff? Is that stuff you should know? Is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
(11:24):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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