Youāre argument is with the Church not me. If you think you are smarter than the RCC thatās your business not mine. There are benefits to smoking, but they are moot to this thread. And Iām not here to argue that smoking is a healthy thing to do, but I will defend the Churchās position on it. There is nothing morally wrong with breathing smoke from a cigarette and the church will undoubtedly maintain this position. The damage smoke causes is different for each person and it is up to them to decide whether smoking is okay for them or not. For some people it is beneficial for them to smoke, for others it is not. For those that smoking is likely to result in a chronic disease, smoking would be a grave sin. That is where
excess comes in. So with that said and the Church to back up this position you are wrong in saying that lungs is not the proper ingestion for smoke. This is not to say that taking up a smoking habit is okay for everyone. I want to stress that those who smoke do not all smoke in habits. Some smoke in leisure every so often which for many people is the prudent choice.
I will also say that the Catholic Church also maintains that when one believes something is sinful/evil, if in fact the Church has not deemed it sinful makes the individual in error. If a person continues to be in error he or she is sinning. If a person wishes not to engage in something that the Church has no teaching against, he or she is free to do so upon their will though.
I suggest you talk to wise Priest that is familiar with church tradition and teaching.
Iām certainly not smarter than the RCC, but she has taken her time to catch up to the science in the past.
Personally I fail to see many benefits from smoking. The only time I have heard that has been from tobacco companies. My wife is a family physician and works in a small town with a 125-bed hospital. In her nearly 30 years of medical practice she has noted to me that at any given time, more than 50% of the beds in the medical ward are occupied by people directly suffering the effects of smoking; an empirical observation perhaps but one would think that with 30 years of consistency, give or take a couple of beds, thereās something to that. Think of that. This is a hospital where beds are lined up in the corridor because there are so few beds available. Part of that is of course related to our particular system of socialized medicine in Canada; the fact remains that the cost to society, of smoking, in lost productivity, etc, is enormous, and those beds could be used to provide better access to medical care.
In New Brunswick, in 2009, they finally passed a law that prohibits adults from smoking in cars that have children on board. Only now in 2009, does a very small province have the guts to punish people legally, for inflicting toxic fumes on innocent participants, their own children.
Until such time as the Church catches up I will consider, given the massive amount of data we have today, smoking to be sinful. I have particularly little mercy for someone inflicting second-hand smoke on children.
While my dad did that to me, I excuse him based on the fact that 50 years ago he didnāt have the knowledge that today is available at the fingertips of anyone with a functioning brain and an IQ of over 75.
So while there may be no Church-defined sinfulness attached to the act of smoking, the practical reality is that one rarely smokes alone in a vacuum. For example in Canada itās illegal to sin in any public building, including up to 30 ft from the entrance. Yet the reality in winter is that workers congregate in the doorway outside to smoke and virtually any public building I enter, including a hospital, requires I cross a smokescreen to get in.
Although it is not intrinsically sinful in the Churchās eyes to smoke, indirectly it most certainly is to disobey legitimate public authority on legitimate laws in the interest of the public order, and it most certainly is sinful to inflict second-hand smoke on the unwilling public who may, in many cases, have allergies or conditions exacerbated by the smoke. It is, quite simply, a form of assault.
and havenāt done the self thing either in many yearsā¦
:banghead: