Have you noticed that the sins I discussed were longer posts than the virtues? I didn’t have to ask myself why because I already knew the answer. It’s because we focus much more on the wrong than we do on the right. I remember an experiment a professor gave to a class where he asked students to speak on their faults and how there were a number of them that voluntarily spoke of them. Then he asked them to speak on their good qualities but almost no one raised their hand.

These sins and virtues are reflective of extreme human behaviors and, while they are practiced by a few and inflicted or bestowed on the many, the majority of us are somewhere in between the two. I found a quote from a book aptly titled Lion and Lamb (by James Patterson and Duane Swierczynski) that describes general human behavior pretty well:

A lot of people thought that life was a struggle between virtue and temptation, angels and devils, good and bad. But that wasn’t the case. The truth was, life was often a choice between bad and worse. Neither of those options felt good, but human beings were compelled to choose, hoping everything would turn out okay despite evidence to the contrary.

I don’t agree with this completely because sometimes we can get it right and choose correctly.

I think the biggest reason that the sins are listed as such is not just because they are the extreme wrong characteristics of a person, but because they are huge blockers of our blessings. When I think of pride especially, it is the “pride” that people have of themselves that stops them from acceptance or change.

Sins and virtues are also reflective of our characters. A sin can be considered to be a character flaw, while a virtue can be thought of as a character attribute. It’s our human nature that we have to acknowledge and either accept or modify, but it’s our character that we build that has to stand strong.