Faith Meets Life: Over-consumption leading to death by gluttony

Medieval writers loved to put things in order. They ordered the stars and the sun and placed the earth in the centre of the cosmos. They created a social and political arrangement where everyone had a place: rulers, land owners, soldiers, trades people, priests, bishops and popes.

They also made lists of sins, the most famous one called the Seven Deadly Sins. It also had its counterpart in a list of virtues, inspired by the Christian Bible, with faith, hope and love at the top, love being the greatest.

Among the great sins stands one that in our age seems very improbable, Gluttony. Excessive eating. It seems improbable because, although many of us take issue with excessive eating, celebrating diets of yogurt, salads and bottled water, and although we are very aware of the dangers of carrying around five to 50 kilograms of fat that is unlikely to be needed anytime soon, we don't often consider excessive eating a moral problem. And categorizing such eating as a sin certainly does have overtones of morality. After all, sin is defined as a moral offense against the Creator.

These thoughts are coming to me as I am sitting in an airplane. Here, above the clouds, I am aware that our modern world encourages overconsumption, not just of food, but of anything we happen to get our hands on. It took a few scores of litres of jet fuel, maybe hundreds, per passenger to get us 10 kilometers up in the air, and I hope there are a few litres left in the tanks to get the 200 of us down safely - in Calgary as it happens.

The airports I passed through this morning were festooned with ads for clothing, food and especially air travel plans. Plane terminals are shopping malls where upscale clothing and soaps tempt the weary traveler whose heavy wallet may need to be purged of its excess cash. A sandwich large enough to a feed a family of eight for the month of November graces the cover of the inflight magazine. And elsewhere in the issue are ads for high end cars and high end hotels.

The Globe and Mail of the day carries an article by Rex Murphy in which he attacks the wastefulness of the entertainment industry. His main point is that the tens of millions of dollars spent creating most movies is wasted on inane acting and plots. Today's media carries comment about the upcoming Olympic games, arguably a narcisistic sports extravaganza for the world's super-rich and the almost super-rich.

At the same time, Stephen Harper, Barak Obama and other leaders of rich countries are trying to revive their economies in sync. Thus our economic crisis will be resolved when we get the machinery of consumerism and over-consumerism back up to speed.

In the meantime, stalwarts of environmental conservation are barely heard. David Suzuki fights a rear-guard action as the Friday host of CBC's The Current. The Green Party's call for living within our means is falling on deaf ears as we are in near panic trying to pull up from the feared collapse of Ontario's car industry. Universities and community colleges continue to churn out graduates who will run our modern financial institutions, industries and media with the net result that we will consume ever more goods and services.

Although it is too late to avoid many environmental calamities, we need to re-imagine the lives we want. Our gluttony is killing us, destroying our fragile planetary home. Which, if you will, is part of God's created universe, and thus our problem is not just an economic and political one, but a moral one. If we cannot imagine a world where less is better, where knowing how to grow potatoes in our back yards is more important than learning trigonometry, where supporting local agriculture and crafts is more important than owning a 4,000 square foot home, and where we forego almost all of our flying we are going to be in a lot of trouble.

I do want to get home by plane in a few days and I may get a snack from the cart that is coming down the aisle. But we do need to seriously reconsider the future demands we are going to make of the Earth.

Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.