Mar 132010
This woman done figgered it out!
From Fox News:
Evelyn Boyd told her husband, a preacher at a Pentecostal church in the city of Bartow, not to disturb her when she locked herself in the room Feb. 7 to fast and pray with only water to drink. Family members forced open the door March 5 and found her dead.
…
The woman’s husband, John Boyd, told the paper he didn’t check on his wife because she felt she was doing what God called her to do and he wanted to respect her privacy.
Awesome job. Good work all around, everyone!
10 Responses to “Getting closer to God via fasting”
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Frakkin one-god nutjobs!
Good: one less failure breeding and/or teaching. I’ve been entirely too tolerant of that sort of thing in my life.
I’ve never seen the point of Christian fasting. Depriving the body of food is harmful, and certainly goes against the Christian notion of treating the body as a temple of God. Besides, the fasting person is just going to launch into a feeding frenzy after it’s over (assuming they don’t die in the first place,) so it’s not like anything was really sacrificed. There is the Catholic concept of “fasting” for Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but the Catholic definition of fasting is so loose that it hardly counts under what most people associate with the term.
> so it’s not like anything was really sacrificed.
Keep in mind, “sacrifice” is a concept somewhat alien to Christian theology. Note that while the term is used quite often, especially WRT Christ “sacrificing” himself by being nailed to a cross, the claim then is that he not only came back from the dead, he also got to go to Heaven. If you know full well before hand that your “sacrifice” is going to either be reversed or lead directly to better things… it’s not really much of a sacrifice, is it. Kinda like *knowing* what the Lotto numbers are, and “sacrificing” a couple of bucks to buy the relevant ticket and instantly winning ten million bucks.
But what Christianity does have is a long history of people abusing themselves in the name of God. Consider the whackjob “flagellants” in the Middle Ages who beat the crap out of themselves with whips and whatnot, or the veneration of martyrs… the more horrible the death, the better.
Darwin award, anyone?
A long time ago, for reasons I don’t recall, a girl friend and I wondered what it took to become a Roman Catholic saint. We read lots of lives of saints, and came away with a digest of it all: die in extreme pain without having had sexual intercourse.
Did that church or her husband learn anything from this?
Unfortunate, bu after all we evolved for feast and famine. Seems sensible to assimilate that with some higher purpose.
Fasting, if used correctly can be used to IMPROVE physical fittness:
http://www.serpentine.org.uk/pages/advice_frank01.html
Religious fasting, self abuse, etc. was a poor’s man way to get “visions” or to overpay for percieved sins.
I vote for a Darwin Award. As for the husband… I vote for him to try to achieve a similar award.
it may be called fasting…but it goes by slow..
> we evolved for feast and famine. Seems sensible to assimilate that with some higher purpose
Yeah, but we also evolved to poop, barf, fart and get cancer. If there’s a religion out there that makes a big religious deal out of those… I really don;t want to be involved.