rwoehmke:
Well… I gues if one doesn’t mind having an increased risk of lung cancer (less than 5% live longer than five years after diagnosis). And if slow suicide as opposed to quick and easy doesn’t faze one and ones smokng presents no danger to the Faith, light up dude. Its about like running to the nearest fire so one can enjoy inhaling the smoke and fumes.
MY emphasis.
Thankyou rwoehmke for mentioning this. This is an important point. Smoking increases you
risk of lung cancer, it is therefore a sufficient but not a necessary cause of cancer. If I am a soldier in wartime I am by definition increasing my
risk of being killed. Does this mean that being a soldier is a sin? Likewise driving increases my
risk of dying in an accident. Does this mean that driving is a sin? People have a bad habit of taking the increased risk as implying a certainty which is poor logic. (Also it would have been nice to make it clearer that only 5% of those
with lung cancer live longer than 5 years. As written it seems to imply that only 5% of smokers live longer than 5 years.)
Slow suicide is an emotive and inaccurate term. If I ingest a poison over a period of time with the express intention of killing myself that is slow suicide. If I knowingly persist in drinking absinthe which will assuredly kill me then with or without the intention I am committing suicide. But if I merely do something which increases my risk of dying that is not suicide although it may be foolish. It depends on the level of risk. Anti-smokers may be convinced by “authorative assertions” by experts but there is much confusion about the studies and statistics. Most anti-smokers I know take it as a kind of “article of faith” or base it on some personal experience rather than as a logically researched position. This is not to say that they are wrong but to point to the lack of firm grounding in “facts” whether those facts support their contention or not. Most myths arise like this from people just
knowing it must be so without checking or researching.
The Church in its wisdom understands this and does not impute bad motives to people who smoke. It does stress that “excess” is bad in this as in many other activities, not least because it will probably increase the risk beyond an acceptable level of tolerance. After all, if a person smokes all his/her life and dies at 90 (20more years than tha alloted 70) has he/she committed a sin? Thay can hardly be accused of committing slow suicide, especially as they have probably outlived many of their non-smoking contemporaries. and yes I HAVE known at least two people who smoked and died, one at 90 and one at 84, well beyond their alloted span.
Also a word of caution on statistics. A doctor friend of mine (a convinced non-smoker by the way) told me that at least in the hospital he works in they
assume smoking is the cause of death in all smokers except in cases of an external agency (eg car crash, bullet etc.) thus falling for the correlation = causation fallacy. Anti-smoking stats are notoriously influenced by anti-smoking faith.
I think in charity posters here should stop casting aspersions of sin and bad faith around. Smoking may be an unwise activity but I doubt that any smokers here are deliberately trying to or expecting to commit suicide and to declare otherwise consitutes a grave slander.
Let us agree then that excessive smoking is a mortal sin. Let us also agree that smoking per se is not a sin. The sin lies in the degree not the action 
