Masterpieces That Refuse to Forget: Deadly. by Hailey Orion (2017)

Proof the system wants us to remember: artists keep creating masterpieces that won’t let us forget.

We were told commandments were simple.
Don’t steal. Don’t kill. Don’t lie. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.

But learning how these words have been reinterpreted across centuries led me to a different conclusion: the commandments were never rules for being a good person. They were instructions for how to worship a god and stay controlled by archaic understandings.

“Taking God’s name in vain” wasn’t about swearing. It was about baptizing violence, greed, and exploitation in holy language.

And the Seven Deadly Sins? We were taught they were our personal failings. Our shame to carry. Our burden to repent.

But Hailey Orion’s Deadly. takes those sins and sings them back to us in a different light—track by track, showing how they are not just about us as individuals. They are the symptoms of a system that profits from our struggle.

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When the sins mirror the system

• Sloth — not laziness, but collapse. The kind of exhaustion that comes when your body and soul can’t keep grinding.

• Gluttony — not greed of appetite, but hunger carefully manufactured, force-fed through consumerism, then condemned.

• Envy — not jealousy as weakness, but the shadow cast by inequality. Envy only thrives where scarcity is designed.

• Greed — the one sin that’s rewarded. Crowned as ambition. Enshrined as success.

• Wrath — not rage as moral failure, but rage as survival when every other outlet is sealed shut.

• Pride — not arrogance, but reclamation. The so-called sin that becomes liberation: the audacity to exist, unapologetic, in a world that told you to disappear.

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Hailey Orion’s Greed

On Greed, Orion preaches a sermon—but inverted.

“If you have enough, you can pay your way to heaven,
I’ll forgive you of your sins…
if you’re modest and you’re quiet,
if you follow, if you buy it,
we think that we’ve been fighting
but we’re falling like Goliath.”

It’s salvation as transaction. Forgiveness as commodity. A gospel of money.

The message is clear:

We are told to be quiet, modest, and obedient—while those preaching at us buy their way out of the very rules they enforce.

That last line is especially haunting:

“We think that we’ve been fighting, but we’re falling like Goliath.”

The illusion of resistance—when collapse is already underway.

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Why This Matters Now

Local and state governments are trying to mandate the Ten Commandments in classrooms, insisting they are merely “part of history.” But as biblical scholars like Dan McClellan point out, there isn’t just one version of the commandments. They’ve shifted across Exodus and Deuteronomy, shaped by political context. And Monte Mader reminds us how often these texts have been weaponized by power—not preserved as neutral morality.

So when an artist like Hailey Orion takes the Seven Deadly Sins and turns them inside out, she’s not blaspheming. She’s remembering. She’s refusing to forget what the system wants buried.

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Reimagining the Lists

What if the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins weren’t meant to police us, but to warn us? What if the authors were trying—through the language they had—to name the patterns that tear societies apart?

We misread them as orders of obedience. But what if they were ancient caution signs?

• Don’t worship false gods → Don’t confuse wealth or power with divinity.

• Don’t take God’s name in vain → Don’t baptize exploitation in sacred language.

• Don’t covet → Don’t build a system where envy festers in scarcity.

• Sloth → Beware of structures that grind people down until they collapse.

• Gluttony → Don’t manufacture appetites only to shame those who consume.

• Greed → Never crown hoarding as virtue.

• Wrath → Listen before anger has no place left to go.

• Pride → Remember: self-worth is survival, not sin.

Seen this way, the lists stop being weapons of control. They start to look like an ancient attempt to say: this is how communities collapse if we aren’t careful.

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The Real Blasphemy

The real blasphemy isn’t our exhaustion.
It isn’t our anger.
It isn’t our hunger.

The real blasphemy is calling greed holy.
The real blasphemy is dressing up cruelty as God’s will.
The real blasphemy is pretending this is about each of us failing, when in truth it’s about all of us trapped in a loop designed to break us.

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This is why Deadly. is a masterpiece that refuses to forget.
It won’t let us look away.

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Your Turn

What masterpiece—album, film, book, poem—has done that for you?
The one that unmasked “morality” to reveal all of us—not just each of us—are caught in this loop.

Drop it in the comments.

Because if the system keeps trying to erase memory, then every masterpiece we name is proof that it can’t.