For example, I assume that only water is allowed for drink, and all food is made as bland as possible.
Can't we agree that any efforts to add flavor, any thought given to the enjoyment of food or drink, anything other than simply nourishing the body, would certainly be pursuing animalistic gluttony - correct?
I mean, if we want to be consistent...
Not quite. Although eating, drinking, sleeping and having sex all fall under the common categories of things one desires, finds pleasure in and/or is essential to do, there are critical differences….1. Eating, drinking and sleeping are all things that are good for you (assuming that one is eating nutritious food, drinking good water and sleeping soundly) but there is a point of consumption after which the benefit of these three becomes reversed. In the case of all three of these, the impact of overconsumption is quite severe and in the extreme causes death. Sex is the only one of those four basic activities which has no upper boundary after which too much consumption is bad for you….. In fact, the more sex a man has, the less chance he has of not contracting prostate cancer. The more sex a women has, the less chance she has of contracting ovarian cancer (for both the man and the woman, this assumes a monogamous husband-wife relationship). Do a search on ‘health benefits of regular sex’…here’s the first link that turned up for me. http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/guide/sex-and-health?page=2 The benefits across the board are endless… and there is absolutely no negative aspects (unless one wants to claim that they are spending too much time on this important activity. In fact, if a husband or wife is withholding sex from his/her spouse, he/she is obviously killing the marriage but the case could be made that he/she is actually doing physical/mental harm to the spouse. 2. Gluttony implies that one is doing something for him/herself. That’s not what having sex is supposed to be… if viewed as something that one is giving as opposed to taking, how can it be gluttony?
I don’t want to speculate. People rub all kinds of little holes through the smoke on “the glass darkly.” I just think that since no one can really know the mind of God, they may well engender negativity when they try to make absolute doctrinal arguments online.