Survery for Sinners

http://www.bigissuescotland.com/features/view/255

Are you a sinner? Good, read this then go do the survey (access through the link):
“Sinning. As part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, I have launched an online survey looking at the degree to which people indulge in the so-called seven deadly sins. Really it’s not sin per se that I’m interested in. It’s the idea of people being able to regulate temptation. We’re all faced with temptation, whether it’s a sexual kind, eating cream cakes or staying at home instead of going to the gym.

Some people are good at managing that and some people are not. I’m interested in why that is the case – why some people succumb to temptation and therefore live ‘sinful’ lives, in the sense that they do things they know they shouldn’t. We pretty much see sin as just another word for being not very good at resisting temptation. If you think there’s nothing wrong with having an affair, I wouldn’t see that as sinful – we’re not making a moral judgement.

But if you don’t want to have an affair and you end up doing exactly that because you can’t resist the other person, then that’s what I find most interesting. We are going to be comparing how much sin is reported from around the UK – Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We’ll do that for the UK and the US as well. So we’ll see who is the most sinful. We’ve no reason to believe that Edinburgh will turn out to be particularly sinful but you never know, it might turn out to be the case.

The question of whether men or women are the more sinful sex is an interesting one. My guess is that it’s going to depend on the sin. I’m an atheist, and for atheists I don’t think sin has a meaning in terms of moral authority. But it goes back to being unable to stop yourself doing something you don’t want to do. The puzzle is, why don’t we do things when we want to and we think we can?”