In many of the stories I write (and in many of my fantasies), I make gluttony out to be more than a little sinful.
And isn't that part of the fun of all this -- to enjoy the good feelings of being so ba-a-a-a-a-ad!
Many Christians, though, look down upon us gluttons (and those who enjoy gluttons' bodies) as children of the devil or something just too horrible to contemplate. This is nothing more than fat hatred -- and an inability to have fun or let others have fun.
Many fat-haters will recount that gluttony is considered one of the "Seven Deadly Sins". In reality, though, I think gluttony is not a sin at all. In fact, it may be a virtue.
A few excerpts from a 2003 article on gluttony as a sin (I have put my comments in parentheses):
According to a 1998 Purdue University study, obesity is associated with higher levels of religious participation. Broken down by creed, Southern Baptists have the highest body-mass index on average, Catholics are in the middle, and Jews and other non-Christians are the lowest. When this finding was brought to the attention of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, he was unperturbed. "I know gluttony is a bad thing," Falwell said. "But I don't know many gluttons." That is one way out of the dilemma -- to deny that overweight people are necessarily sinful gluttons. But it could also be that gluttony is not really a sin.
. . . Nor is the idea that gastronomic indulgence is an outrage against the divine order to be found in the Bible. In "Gluttony," the latest in a series of short books on the seven deadly sins published by the Oxford University Press, Francine Prose observes that most of the feasting in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament "is, as it should be, celebratory, unclouded by guilt, regret or remorse."
It was not until the sixth century that Pope Gregory the Great classified gluttony -- along with pride, greed, lust, envy, anger, and sloth -- as one of the gravest perils to the soul.(Growinluvhandles: See, nothing in Jesus's teachings about gluttony; it was a Catholic pope six centuries after Jesus who declared this. If you want to consider gluttony a sin, go worship Pope Gregory.)
St. Thomas Aquinas -- a hefty fellow himself, as it happens -- declared that gluttony had "six daughters": "excessive and unseemly joy" are the first two, followed by "loutishness, uncleanness, talkativeness, and an uncomprehending dullness of mind." Others have claimed that gluttony paves the way to lechery. "When the belly is full to bursting with food and drink, debauchery knocks at the door," wrote the medieval German monk Thomas a Kempis.(Growinluvhandles: Yeah, he got this right. There's nothing like a full belly to put me "in the mood".)
Thus our expanding national girth is more a matter of economic forces than of moral failure. Yet, as Prose observes, many obese Americans still view their condition in terms of guilt and punishment. Those on group diets like Weight Watchers are especially prone to use religious language -- "sinner," "saint," "confession," "absolution" -- to describe their struggle. Perhaps we have not come so far from the sixth-century worldview of Pope Gregory the Great.(Growinluvhandles: And of course, in modern America -- and particularly during this economic decline -- the obese and specifically the obese poor make easy targets for those who conjure up hatred. May all those who espouse such hate on their plump fellow sisters and brothers, may they be thrown into the lake of fire for eternity! No, I cannot be that cruel even to them. May these fat-haters at least have an afterlife where they learn to enjoy large quantities of heavenly food without guilt. And may they grow into such fat angels that they can no longer fly.)
Here is the link to the entire article from the Boston Globe:
boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/23/the_deadliest_sin/In conclusion, I say, "Grab some love handles, grab some deliciously fattening food, and enjoy this life to the fullest!" May our afterlives be even more heavenly!
