New vices for the new millennium

In the bible there were seven, but the Pope has decided that isn't enough. More4 takes a look at the new deadly sins.

Now have you sinned since our last broadcast? The Catholic church is worried people aren't taking sins seriously enough. So the Vatican has decided to update its list of the seven deadly sins. But whereas the focus of the traditional sins--LUST, GREED, SLOTH, WROTH, ENVY, PRIDE, and GLUTTONY is individual, those which we concite today is seen as the hellfire or more social in nature.

In the days when the artist Hieronymus Bosch gave us his view of the sins they said the earth was flat. Now the Vatican says its new sins will take into account the aftereffects of globalization. New sins on the block could be Abusing drugs or selling them to others, Genetic manipulation such as embryo research which the Vatican opposes, Morally dubious experiments think Dolly the sheep, Polluting the environment, Creating social inequalities and social injustice, Causing poverty and which some would say goes with it, Accumulating excessive wealth. Wealth, something the church itself has been known to do.

A part of the impetus for the change is a recent survey that said that 60% of Italian Catholics did not go to confession, but the Vatican stresses that it's not doing away with the old sins just reinterpreting them in a modern context. You're too obsessed with the sin of sex; it seems that you can only sin sexually. But instead there're many other sins or perhaps much more grave that don't have anything to do with sex, they have to do with life, they have to do with the environment, they have to do with justice. So that's what the Vatican thinks, but what do you think our modern sins should be? Binge drinking, using your mobile while driving, putting the recycling in the wrong box. To send us your suggestions, go to our website channel4.com/news.