We burn down rainforests, clear jungles, despoil environment so that we can create new soil-poor farms to feed more mouths. There are just too, too many of us but our leaders ignore problem at root of world's burgeoning troubles: overpopulation.

And in Rome, new Pope will continue traditional church doctrine against contraception. How ironic that horsemen: death, disease, famine, and pestilence, should be loosed on world by City of Faith.

Gluttony

Ah! Super-sized America. Two thirds of us are overweight, four in ten clinically obese. Do we have a national metabolic problem? No, we are a nation of guzzlers: we eat too, too much food, consume voluminous cheap foreign goods to tune of billions of dollars per year, and siphon majority of earth's oil into our gluttonous SUVs. We have lost all sense of moderation and balance. We live to consume and then poison our environment with garbage such overconsumption produces.

Lust

Forty percent of marriages involve at least one affair. Our religious leaders, sports stars, celebrities and even a former President, indulge their libidos when opportunity combines with personal power. Sex has become vehicle for selling anything and everything, its economic value proved over and over. Desperate housewives and Internet pornography are not mere "lusting in my heart" but reveal lurid landscape we have developed that creates superstars out of those who exude sex and virility as if it were a talent or a sign of character. We have birthed industries and empires based solely on gossip, rumor, and promise of sexually-oriented details. Plastic surgeons become millionaires over bodies they rework for goal of increasing desirability and eliciting greater lust in eyes of beholder.

Are these sins really deadly?

Regardless of "moral value" vote trumpeted after 2004 elections, few of us regard all manifestations of these sins as totally unacceptable. We may be tempted, we may fall short of our aspirations. But when we elevate such personal and characterological weaknesses to level of cultural goals, we pay price: a violent, dangerous, and self-destructive society that demands ever more aggressive security, protection, and policing, and produces a burgeoning prison population.