Living, breathing Bible

Living, breathing Bible

I've heard of the concept of a "living, breathing" Constitution. Now, it seems the Bible lives and breathes just the same.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/10/eavatican110.xml
I wish I had the primary source of this article, so I wasn't at risk of misunderstanding the language used in these new "mortal sins" ("genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy and taking drugs").

So many thoughts bug me about this that I don't know where to start. I guess my first problem with it is that it seems to be encoding modern political fads into the eternal moral standards of the Church. Like I said, this is just like someone reinterpreting the Constitution to mean something that fits their political purposes. It goes without saying that the Church ought to be above this kind of nonsense.

The doctrine of the Church ought to be eternal, absolute, and self-evident. What is absolute about saying that pollution is a mortal sin? Is my soul going to suffer eternal death because the lightbulbs I use aren't energy star compliant? How about using drugs? Am I to stop drinking soda and start refusing penicillin, or is it only illegal drugs that I cannot use? Illegal in what country? How wealthy can I become before it is considered obscene? Shall I cut myself off before reaching the highest tax bracket, or shall I not have any savings at all? To me, the chief virtue of the church is that its moral standards are absolute. It provides a moral foundation, a system of deciding if something is right or wrong, a bedrock of unquestionable morality. With these behaviors now considered to be mortal sins, it should be pretty important to know if I am at risk of eternal damnation, for which there doesn't seem to be any standard.

The "sins of yesteryear" - sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and pride - have a "rather individualistic dimension", he told the Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper.
The new seven deadly, or mortal, sins are designed to make worshippers realise that their vices have an effect on others as well.
"The sins of today have a social resonance as well as an individual one," said Mgr Girotti. "In effect, it is more important than ever to pay attention to your sins."

So far as I'm concerned, this means that the nature of my entire relationship with God must have changed. I had considered it to be a personal one, in which He cherishes me individually and favors my personal relationship with Him, but now the Church seems to be telling me that He kind of just likes us all as a whole. Evidently not only am I to meet a minimum standard of not being bad, but I actually have to be really, really good, or I'm going straight to hell. And, so far as I can tell, all in the pursuit of political correctness. I wonder how many years it will be before the Church stipulates that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, I have to eat organic foods and always defer my moral judgments to the United Nations.