I'm sure readers are familiar with the Seven Deadly Sins - either through hearing about them in church, sometimes ad nauseam, or through committing them!
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) - The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things
Now a team from Kansas State University have analyzed the 'sinfulness' of the United States in terms of each of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Geographers have mapped the sinfulness of the United States, attempting to come up with numbers for each of the seven deadly sins.
Thomas Vought and colleagues at Kansas State University devised indexes for sloth, gluttony, lust, greed, wrath, envy and pride ... Sloth was based on spending per capita on arts and entertainment compared to the employment rate, gluttony on fast-food outlets per capita, lust on rates of sexually transmitted disease, greed on average incomes compared to the number of people living below the poverty line, wrath on violent crimes per capita and envy on property crimes.
The researchers decided that pride is the master sin and therefore merged the rates of the lesser sins.
Vought presented the findings at the American Geographers' meeting Tuesday in Las Vegas, a city sometimes regarded as the sin capital of the United States.
Intrigued, I investigated further, and found the charts of each Deadly Sin. Here they are, in alphabetical order of sin. Click each one for a larger version.
I regret to say that my county scores high on Lust, Pride, Sloth and Wrath. Clearly my saintly example hasn't been working very well!
Peter
Interesting. It appears that my county (Montgomery, VA) appears to be average/below in all categories. In fact, SW VA and WV appear to be really blue in most categories with the only red in gluttony. I wonder how much that has to do with the concentration of fast food joints around interstates 64, 77, and 81...
ReplyDeleteMy county appears to be big on pride and wrath but meek as a kitten on everything else.
ReplyDeleteWhich... yeah, that fits.
It would seem the best place to live to avoid all seven sins is the upper Midwest; Iowa if picking one state.
ReplyDeleteAntibubba
I have to seriously question the criteria used for some of these, Lust in particular. I'm thinking STD transmission has something to do with poor sex education. There's plenty of sinning going on in places where people are having safer sex. I would have taken into account things like strip clubs and prostitution.
ReplyDelete