Unchecked................................

       Sin is not some demonic thing.  It's just our perverse tendency to fuck things up, to favor the short term over the long term, the lower over the higher.  Sin, when it is committed over and over again, hardens into loyalty to a lower love.
       The danger of sin, in other words, is that it feeds on itself.  Small moral compromises on Monday make you more likely to commit other, bigger moral compromises on Tuesday.  A person lies to himself and soon can no longer distinguish when he is lying to himself and when he isn't.  Another person is consumed by the sin of self-pity, a passion to be a righteous victim that devours everything around it as surely as anger or greed.
       People rarely commit the big sins out of the blue.  They walk through a series of doors.  They have an unchecked problem with anger.  They have an unchecked problem with drinking or drugs.  They have an unchecked problem of sympathy.  Corruption breeds corruption.  Sin is the punishment of sin.
-David Brooks,  The Road To Character