I think they have value as a consideration because I see them as the main motivations for doing evil shit. Not all instances of those motivations result in evil but most evil has at least one of them involved.

And pride absolutely belongs on the list.

Like there’s the pride one can feel in accomplishing something that boosts confidence and makes the person want to accomplish more. Or there’s the pride where one person thinks they are better than others because they have accomplished some things (sometimes reducing everyone else into a binary “did they also do this one thing I did?”).

And then there’s the pride at being part of a group that plays a role in shit going on today and played a role in WWII. Actually, it was extreme in that case but many wars have leveraged pride to convince the population to fight it.

Each of them can be either ok or problematic.

Lust can play an important role in relationships. It can also reduce relationships to sexual episodes, sometimes without consent of all involved parties.

Greed can motivate someone to better themselves to increase the amount of resources they have access to. It can also drive people to exploit others for the resources their skills or time can access.

Wrath can motivate positive change when people get tired of systemic problems and it can drive someone to help another against a predator. It can also motivate assaults, murders, and genocides.

Sloth can conserve resources when it’s not necessary to use them. It can also result in resources crumbling away due to lack of maintenance or care.

Envy can motivate positive changes similar to greed, if the person can handle it in a healthy way. It can also lead to similar bad outcomes as the others, depending on what the person is envious about.

Gluttony is one I’m having trouble thinking of a positive for. I guess it can also motivate positive change to set up a position where one can be gluttonous. But consumption of an excessive amount of anything is at best neutral if you can do it without affecting others, and will often place some kind of burden on others around you.

So from my perspective, the seven deadly sins can be backed up with logic and reason, and they make more sense to me than the 10 Commandments (which is half sensible rules and half about religious power, and the religious power ones all get listed first).

And Hell was first mentioned during the Medieval period. Sometime around the 1200s, I believe? The first versions of the Bible said that Lucifer was cast into Tartarus, where the Greek gods imprisoned the Titans.

The Bible itself is a collection of interpretations and stories across a span of hundreds of years. Jesus says that the Old Testament is null and void in the Bible, and then John later on says that the Old Testament is still in effect and that’s not what Jesus meant and that he knows Jesus better than his disciples did, despite living over a hundred years later.

The King James version of the Bible was edited to be a piece of pro-monarchy propaganda that was published at a time when many monarchies were literally losing their heads. The history of Christianity can essentially be summed up as hundreds of years of groups arguing over whose head-canon is right.

Regardless of what you and I think of the 7 deadly sins, they are an established part of the religion and make this contrarian interpretation of the song work. Personally, though, I much prefer Jesus’s mindset of throwing tables, beating up the rich, and telling people who blame women wearing revealing outfits for their own moral failings to tear out their own eyes so they stop.

So therefore are an invention of the church and need to be taken with a grain of salt.

As an outsider it’s funny how religious people pick some invented stories to be better than other invented stories even within the same belief.