An Essay on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Ten Commandments

The thesis of this essay should not be shocking and controversial, but, for some reason, it is: and that thesis is the belief that the Bible is logical and makes perfect sense, and is not random hallucinatory gibberish, which some people believe, and which, the author is ashamed to admit, he used to believe, too, until he developed the wisdom articulated in this essay. The best way to understand the logic of the argument which the Bible makes is by means of the idea that the Ten Commandments are actually a prohibition against the seven deadly sins, which is made clear by a process that maps the seven deadly sins to the Ten Commandments. This is the map:
(1) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house: gluttony.
(2) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's slaves: sloth.
(3) Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's property. Thou shalt not bear false witness: greed.
(4) Thou shalt not commit adultery: lust.
(5) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife: envy.
(6) Thou shalt not kill. Honor thy mother and thy father: wrath.
(7) I am the Lord your God. You shall hold no others above me. Honor the Sabbath and keep it holy: pride.
Obviously, if this thesis is true, then neither the Ten Commandments nor the seven deadly sins should be taken literally at face value; instead, they are metaphors for a broader idea of religious ethics and morality, and some degree of interpretation and analysis is necessary to infer their true, deeper meaning, which the author describes as the wisdom of God. As one example, "honor thy mother and thy father" does not literally refer to one's parents at all, but, rather, is a general statement about appreciating the society into which one is born and not harboring resentment and hatred for that society, which is, after all, the world God made and the world God gave to you for you to live in, which, in a more direct sense, is the world which your parents made and which your parents gave to you for you to inherit, but the counterfactual of having this sense of honor towards one's parents and towards society is nothing other than the sin of wrath directed against it and them; many other examples are given in the pages that follow, and the story which unfolds has a beautiful symmetry in which each one of the Ten Commandments lines up with one of the seven deadly sins as its negative inverse.
This short essay, which can easily be read in under one hour, intends to provide that analysis of the wisdom of God, and to explore the interesting results of the map outlined above, which constitutes, in a very real sense, a map of the Bible by means of which one can navigate its contents.

Russell Hasan was born the son of a white Jewish mother and a dark-skinned Muslim father—and that isn't the strangest thing about him. His father had ties to the mafia—nope, not the weirdest thing about him. He thought he was a gay man for many years before realizing he is agender asexual—relatively normal compared to what truly makes him strange. Do you want to know what the weirdest, strangest thing about Russell is?
He's a WRITER.
Yes, that's right. He writes. Why? How? Why would he want to do that to himself? How could he allow this to happen to himself? He is still trying to figure that one out. Therapy can cure lots of things and alcohol and drugs can cure other things, but the only cure for being a writer is to write, so he writes. He's not into BDSM, yet for some reason he has chosen to punish himself by having a passion for writing and a need to write. Despite having made the huge mistake of choosing to be a writer, his books have sold over 10,000 copies, so perhaps it was not the worst mistake he ever made after all. He does not have one particular bestseller but has instead spread those 10,000 sales across many books he wrote. His magical journey of self-torture begins when he has the idea for a new book, and then continues when he wakes up at 6am to write from 6am to 8am before work every day (he has a day job—he's not insane! His day job is being a lawyer, the most boring, evil job in the world, by the way), and, after many cups of Starbucks matcha tea and Coca Cola (never Pepsi—yuck!) he somehow puts words onto a page. He has written 30 books, both nonfiction and fiction, but, as something of a twist on the traditional successful indie author model, he is known more for his indie nonfiction, not his fiction. But he does write fiction. Some of his fiction is good too, probably, he hopes.