Well in Catholicism the sins are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Those are the seven deadly sins. They are venial sins, whereas a mortal sin would be any of the ten commandments.
Calling attention to your character specific "sins" might prevent your readers from participating in the story with their own perceptions of "sinful" behavior. One way to do that would be to show your character making choices to satisfy herself instead of making choices that include others. Some readers might see that type of behavior as sinful and others might see it as immoral or amoral. At the very least, your readers would be free to make up their own mind about the character rather than locking them into what you, the author, are telling them.
This is the best advice in the thread. This is totally inaccurate. Mortal sin is defined as grave action committed by a person acting freely and with knowledge of his own wrongdoing. Venial sin is any wrong action that lacks one of those three characteristics. The seven deadly sins are virtually always mortal, hence the moniker.
Many of the things Laughing Rabbit talked about were a sin in the church I grew up in. It was a sin for a woman to not be submissive to a man. It was a sin to hold hands, roller skate, go bowling, dance, for men and women to go swimming together and go to movies. Some saw television as a sin. Women could not wear form-fitting clothing because it would make men "lust" after them.
Perhaps this is just because of different locations and teachings, but I was always taught that a mortal sin does fit all the categories you spoke of, along with the venial, but I was always told that the seven deadly sins aren't normally mortal unless they're committed on the extreme end of things - for example, if someone become proud to the point of being narcissistic, or if you were envious to the point of begrudging someone else their success.
There are a whole lot of sins, a good amount of which that I don't think should be sins (But that's not my decision to make), but one of the most defining features of someone who's radical with their religions is that they believe that they have the right to pass judgement on other people. This is because they believe themselves to be more righteous than other people, even though we're all on the same level down here. Of course, they have no right to judge other people, and it's a whole lesson in the New Testament that you aren't allowed to. While this applies to a whole lot of religious people, someone who's radical about it will take it too far and try to control other people's lives to force them to "act right." The more level-headed and caring members know they have no right to judge other people, and would be more inclined to give advice and try to help, rather than criticize. Only those without sin can throw stones, and all that. I agree with @Friedrich Kugelschreiber, the rules laid out in the Bible deal far more with the internal, rather than the external. But, it's important to note that your actions still have consequences, and are still sins. Also, someone who's just using religion instead of actually committing to it will try to "bargain" with the world. They'll have an attitude like God owes them for following the Bible and converting people to their religion. They'll most likely act like they're the hottest burger on the grill, too.
Personally I don't see actions as sins. I see that a humans we try things out, and they work or they don't. If we willfully hurt someone else it will come back and bite us. Rather than see things as sins I see them as mistakes we can learn from. We need to stop judging each other and realize we are infants in the process of learning. My brother murdered his neighbors. It was horrific for all involved. What was the cause - a combination of an unrelenting judgemental religious upbringing with a tyrant of a minister in our church, and my brother's inability to cope with it. So he found prescription drugs and was taking six different ones when he finally flipped out, blamed the religious neighbors for his problems and killed them. Was that a sin? Yes, but...one needs to understand rather than judge. It took me a long time to reach any kind of peace of mind at all relative to this. He threatened to have someone kill me....that went on for years. I could finally let it rest once he passed away.
You may have to build the character to show why or how they perceive the sin. Also, Christians are not the only ones that have groups that have "extreme" sins. Kind of tired of the "extreme" is always a Bible banging woman.
Stephen King had a LOT of these kinds of characters in his books. Off the top of my head, they appear in Needful Things, Salem's Lot, The Mist, amongst others. It almost came down to, anything the character disapproved of and didn't like was sinful, and that could be literally anything. Riding in a motorcar, or watching teevee, talking to strangers, eating nice food, etc. King's characters were all small town, isolated and relatively rural people, and often (in the case of The Mist) had borderline mental health issues. If you're just depicting someone who is ultra religious, rather than an actual fanatic, keep that in mind.
"Yes, you who would leave everything that you cannot control It begins with your family, but soon it comes 'round to your soul Well, I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned." --Leonard Cohen, The Sisters of Mercy
I agree with needing to build the character and make sure all the sins jive with their lifestyle and personality. For example, someone whose job requires a lot of technology probably aren't going to deem technology a sin. A woman who has her own job probably isn't going to think that anything other than staying at home as a mother is a sin for all other women. And yeah, I definitely agree that you should look at other groups than Christians, too - as a Catholic, I feel ashamed of just existing as a Catholic sometimes.
Just the lens that society tends to view religion through - I don't know if it's just that I've somehow come across all the media that's critical of religion, but sometimes people will hear of someone being Christian and immediately make snap judgments. That gets to my head sometimes, because there are definitely some horrible things that Christianity promotes and some horrible things that some Christians believe in, and even if I don't agree with those beliefs, I feel guilty about it all the same, so I can't even blame the media that makes snap judgments on us. And that applies to the post above because I have to remind myself that almost all religions have those sorts of beliefs and that sort of followers, and it's not just me and my religion. I probably didn't explain that all that well, but it's a complicated feeling.
I have a friend who was raised a fundamentalist Muslim. As we compared notes we found that many of the same things were considered sins. I've already worked it through in the books I've written. At this point I don't write-in religion. But I do insert elements of spirituality. If I was to create a world complete with characters, I would not include their religious beliefs. But that's a personal choice. Each of us had to follow our own muse.
