Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

The Seven Deadly Sins are tied to religion, but not really in the Bible. So where did this naughty list come from?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Josh. Jerry's here for Dave, and we're talking today about the seven deadly zins. Seven deadly zins? Did I say zins? That's a wine brand. It is. I was thinking it's pretty bold to label your wine as deadly. Yeah, good point. Never thought about that.

But I think they're able to because the seven deadly sins are so widely known 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. That's right. 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. Oh, you haven't? It's a fan theory. Yeah, that apparently Sherwood Shorts has kind of backed up 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. Mr. Howell, obviously, greed. Mrs. Howell, gluttony, and partially sloth is what this says. Marianne is envy, and then, of course, Gilligan is sloth, and he's the one that is keeping them trapped on the island through his sloth.

Yeah, there are some really great fan theories around Gilligan's Island, not just that one. Yeah, I love that stuff. It's fun. I do, too. But, yeah, that's the Seven Deadly Sins, the Skipper and the rest. They haven't always been called the seven deadly sins, and as a matter of fact, seven is a trim down version of the original eight. They've been called everything from the capital vices, cardinal sins, capital sins, vice sins, I think, if you want to combine everything together. And the Roman Catholics are nuts for this kind of stuff. And over the centuries, as the church has evolved, the whole thing has just kind of been whittled.

down or changed. There have been different names. I think pride used to be called vangloriousness or vanglory. Instead of sloth, they had melancholy. Like, basically 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. Yeah, that's right. By the way, I think vanglory is probably already a band name, but that would be a pretty good band name. Metal, for sure. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Christian metal.

Yeah, or I was going to 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. I don't either. Poor Nickelback, but I think they're one of like the richest bands on the planet. Oh, I'm sure. Anyway, Vanglory coming to a theater near you, or a concert venue near you. Okay.

But you could also call a theater. I'm getting sidetracked. Speaking of theaters, everyone should go out and get tickets for our live tour this year, right? Oh, good one, Chuck. Yeah, you can get tickets on Stuff You Should Know.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 5,000 in Canada. That's not true. Sorry you 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. Yeah, but I think we're doing six cities, though, which is, you know, it's pretty good. It's going to be fun.

Yeah. Can't wait. Yeah. But go grab tickets. It's going to 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 human. of humanity. 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 345C. E. Vagrius Ponticus. Which means Evan the Pontiac in English.

Oh, okay. According to me, at least. That's right. But he was the guy that gets credit, basically, is the first person to, um, I'm not. kind of write these things out and get it out on mass. Yeah, but he had eight of them, the eight evil thoughts, right? 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 than you'd think. And he wrote a bunch of this stuff down. in the antireticus, which is his celebrated master work. And this is where the eight evil thoughts first appear. That's right.

Gluttony, lust, and of course we're not talking just sexual lust here. It's kind of lustly desires for worldly things. Greed, which was avarice at the time, anger, sloth, sadness, vanglory, and pride are all in there. Yeah. And although we now think of the Seven Deadly Sins as 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 it applied to initially. 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 them. I'm just writing about them. That's right. You want to take a break? Yeah. Okay. We're going to take a break.

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Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. All right, Chuck. All right, Chuck. So Evagrius Ponticus. This basically created these seven deadly sins or eight deadly sins as a roadmap for monks. And then some other people came along a couple centuries later and 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 St. Gregory, the great, who later became, or no, I guess probably first was Pope Gregory, the first.

Yeah. Oh, and he became sainted later. 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 least two miracles after your death. Yeah, that's right. Boy, you really remember that stuff. I do. I do remember some of it. Yeah. Nice work. Yeah. So Pope Gregory I first, before he was a pope, wrote his masterwork. And it was basically sort of a real dissection of the book of Job called. Moralia 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 gobbity gook, 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. Yeah. And like all the terrible behaviors that come out of it, right? So like, like, like reveling in your neighbor's misfortune kind of thing. Like, like these are,

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 on to this. They're like, this is great. 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 the deadly sins kind of coming off as branches. And it became very familiar because you would paint this on the wall of your church somewhere. Yeah. 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 sins. soul. And after that you would, after you die, you would go to hell. That's why they're called deadly sins. It's 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. Yeah, that for some reason struck me as funny. It was the fourth Lateran council in 1214 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. That's right. Yeah, you'd 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 Mitch. Right. And that time you stepped into a bear trap. Oh, my God, I thought that was hilarious. That's right. 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 and hell wasn't 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. 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 these seven deadly sins in particular as kind of the hot thing in Catholicism. Yeah.

And it's still around in Catholicism, apparently in 2008. the Catholic Church, we're like, hey, we've updated some more seven deadly sins for the aughts, I guess is probably how they put it. Genetic modification is one. Yeah. Carrying out experiments on humans. Okay. Polluting the environment. I can get behind that. Causing social injustice, sure.

Heck yeah. Causing poverty. You know it. Becoming obscenely wealthy. Yeah. And then, of course, taking drugs. Yeah. It doesn't seem like a deadly sin.

Yeah, well, you know. They were on a roll. So those are the seven modern deadly sins? Is that how they're framing it? That's what they tell me at the Vatican. 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 out. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app. or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.