Now, when I talk about the deadliness of anger, indignation, rage, wrath, going Rosie, whatever you want to call it . . . I’m not talking about the natural ebb and flow of our emotions. Heating up is not always evil and deadly.

For example: my wife’s Italian. She’s very passionate. She feels deeply about everything. If she sees a starving orphan from Africa on TV, she’s flying off to Namibia with a case of granola bars in tow to try to feed and then adopt the baby.

On the other hand, when I repeatedly pee on the toilet seat, go hunting for 22 weeks out of the year, smoke a cigar in her closet, leave dead bait in her SUV, or say the wrong thing while she’s trying on a dress—God help me! I had better run for my life, because the same passion she shows in saving a kid will manifest in attempting to sever my head (You’ve gotta love Italian women!). The cool thing about my hot wife is that these deep feelings don’t bring on disasters. Her justifiable anger at my antics does not end in my destruction.

Anger turns ugly when it latches onto to the will. Os Guinness says that, “Anger becomes a deadly sin . . . when the will is directly responsible for the rise and expression of the emotion.” Where the person starts going over to the dark side with anger is when the person (or party or religion) intentionally incites and directs unjust indignation to the end that his opponents are marked for destruction.

The classic over-correction to sinful anger is never getting PO’ed at anything any longer, which is sinfully Pollyanna-ish. Look, if something is evil, goofy, unjust, uncalled for and blatantly bogus, the sane person is supposed to get wound up. This type of understandable anger is not wrong—it is righteous. To not get ticked off when God and common sense calls you to is to assist wicked jack asses by sitting on your kum-ba-yah be-hind.

Where anger goes south is when it blows through the roadblocks of the love of God, the love of your neighbor and the good sense of your brain. When wrath hits this boiling point it is too powerful for the punk, party or people harboring such hatred, and it is here that the ramifications become rancid.

So, how do we know whether or not we’re being a conduit for hell’s wrath to be spewed out on our friends, our family or the masses? Os Guinness states that there are five typical skid marks that denote the bad kind of anger. They are:

1. The contribution of the will to our flipping out. (Already covered above)

2. The wrongness of the motive. The motives for anger are varied, but often tied to a sense of impotence in the face of entitlement, or self-pity. Entitlement-provoked anger rehearses to itself . . . “I deserve thus-and-such. It is owed me. If I cannot have it, I will become angry and, in my anger, find a way to get it.” Self-pity, in contrast, mulls over and over: “This should not be happening to me. I don’t deserve it. I’m angry and I’m not going to take it.” In either case, a purely self-consumed motive leads beyond the self to inflict its anger on others.

3. The third feature of anger—its uncontrollability—is central to understanding the deadly sin. As Henry Fairlie wrote in the ‘70’s, the reason why extremists and revolutionaries always corrupt and betray their own faith is “the wrath they will not check.”

4. The fourth feature, the desire for revenge, is also central to anger, as either an incitement or an outcome. However an insult or injury is perceived, anger simply wants to “get back” at the perpetrator. As a result, prolonged anger becomes a perverted desire for justice that grows into an obsessive rage and finally into hatred. No longer a thunderclap, it becomes a stoked furnace of potentially terrible destruction. Continued...