Sin of gluttony
Term no longer refers just to food and drink
But gluttony, say scholars and theologians, is as modern as McDonald's — and Game Box and overdraft protection.
It's all about excess.
The trick is figuring out at what point we cross the line — from being a person who has simply reached for another glazed doughnut, from being a nation that invented the SUV, from being a global economy that prods its citizens to always buy more. Where have we crossed the line to become a people who individually and collectively are guilty of something that can be categorized as a sin?
In the beginning, gluttony was strictly about food and drink. And, in fact, technically it still is, says Mary Louise Bringle, a professor of philosophy and religion at Brevard College in North Carolina and author of "The God of Thinness: Gluttony and Other Weighty Matters."
The etymology of the word, she notes, refers to "that which you take down your gullet." Gluttony, she adds, was never about the palate. "It's not about enjoying the food. It's about using it as an anesthetic." Gluttony dulls the senses; that's why the first few bites of ice cream taste good, and the half-gallon ingested in one sitting "doesn't taste at all," Bringle says.
Gluttony is now seen by society at large as a bad health choice — or sometimes, if we're more forgiving, as a matter of metabolism or an "issue"; at worst, like most of the seven deadly sins, it's seen as a character flaw. Ours is an age when the Food Pyramid and Freud have taken the place of Dante's Circles of Hell as the reference point for gluttony. We're more comfortable seeing overeating as an addiction, over-imbibing as a disease, excessive shopping as a weakness or just a credit-rating problem. In America, if we think of gluttony as a sin, it's often with a touch of irony; consider the dessert called Chocolate Decadence or, for that matter, that old standby Devil's Food Cake.
But gluttony as sin makes sense, says professor Rodger Bufford, who teaches psychology at George Fox University, a Quaker institution in Oregon. Overeating can hurt our health and therefore, by extension, can hurt others, including our families and everybody else whose insurance rates go up because we over-indulged. And "at a deeper level," Bufford says, "I think it affects our relationship with God."
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I have had a problem with my weight for over 40 years. I have now...
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