fandomhigh | Ethics, Friday, September 18, 2020

"Last week sparked some very interesting conversations," Anakin said as he paced around the room. "Let's keep that going. Christianity, one of this planet's major religions, takes a group of behaviors or habits that lead to other immoralities and call them, slightly overdramtically, the 'Seven Deadly Sins.' The seven sins are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth."

He smiled a little ruefully. "I know I've fallen victim to...most of them...over the course of my life, the emotions that can overwhelm you and lead to some monumentally stupid life choices."

And Anakin Skywalker knew from monumentally stupid life choices.

"There are some instincts that call to us more strongly than others, though: a favorite vice, if you would. There's a saying here that is as probably as old as this list of deadly sins: 'pride goes before a fall'. In my world, we put it slightly differently: 'Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.'"

He passed out a sheet of paper that gave ~~links to that wiki article up there~~ summaries of the deadly sins. "Now, which of these is your go-to? Where do you gravitate when you are angry or stressed? Do you think these behaviors are even all that negative? Can they be channeled into a positive direction?"

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"Wrath," Illyana replied cheerfully. "Though I have been told to frame it more positively. I am inclined towards 'forceful and emotional solutions to bad situations,' and I 'need to remember that sometimes a less forceful solution is the better one.'"

Which was a shame, as far as Yana was concerned, because was perfectly fine with the idea of being wrathful. As was probably evident.

"Do you actually want it framed more positively?" Anakin asked. "You seem fine embracing wrath."

"My master says that 're-framing it will make my actions more productive than destructive,'" Illyana replied with a practiced ease of someone who had spent many hours in mediation working on this. "And I am trying to be a Good Person most of the time. But it's not my nature."

"And sometimes destruction is necessary so that something else can be created."

"I think it may depend on the amount of destruction against what is being created," Anakin said. "I find a lot of time what has been created is wanted to be worth the price, even if the balance isn't exactly there."

"Oh, no, I mean literally. Matter is neither created or destroyed, just transformed, even when working with magic. Every destruction literally creates something else eventually, we just don't always know what or when. Not, like, 'by blowing you up I can create an ice cream sundae or the perfect world' or something like that," Illyana said, blinking. "If things didn't get destroyed, the universe would entropy, and that would suck."

"Though sometimes you do just need to kill someone or beat the shit out of them to stop something worse from happening, and give the timeline some room to breathe. But it's important to know the difference, and I don't think it's necessarily bad to enjoy it if they really pissed you off in the process."

Ethics, Friday, September 18, 2020

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