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Obesity costs us billions a year in health cost. Fat people die horrible deaths. Diabetes and heart disease can cause years of pain and suffering. Amputation of feet, extreme shortness of breath, chest pains are common. The families must slow down their activities to take care of the obesity problem in its midst.

I await your proposal showing that you care for these people who have succumbed to gluttony, evil and temptation.

There is nothing inherently evil with eating a cheeseburger. Furthermore, one cigarette never killed anyone. The same cannot be said with one act of homosexual sodomy. Something is wrong not because it may be harmful or because the majority condemn it. Something is wrong only because God says it is wrong. Every religion which teaches a sexual ethic all agree on important moral issues, including that homosexual sodomy is wrong. In addition, self-destruction is universally condemned, as well. Hence, while jumping out of an airplane without a parachute is not explicitly condemned anywhere, the anticipated and initiated self-destruction which would result is condemned. If every cheeseburger resulted in obesity and heart disease, and if only cheeseburgers were the cause of all obesity and all heart disease, then the moral thing to do would be to stop the behavior which causes the unneeded suffering, rather than wasting resources treating the natural retribution of the wrong (immoral) behavior. It's the same with cigarettes. Not every cancer is caused by smoking, but if they were, then yes, ban the behavior and you have cured the disease. It's the kind thing to do, to discourage unneeded suffering. To be kind is central to the practice of many people's faiths.

As a sidebar, it is commendable that you are thinking about moral issues, rather than just rolling over and saying: "Well, gee. MTV says it's all okay, so I guess it all is" or "Hollywood approves of it, so it must be all right."

Your use of single examples of eating badly to answer my question is disingenuous. A person does not become morbidly obese by eating a cheeseburger. You ignore the pain and suffering caused by this sin of gluttony. Surely this sin is evil. Look at the pain and suffering it causes.

I would continue to explain it to you, but you are not intellectually honest enough to acknowledge that you are caught in a serious inconsistency with your position. Your call for the government to deal with these evils of human behavior is moral fascism and no other term would do it justice.

As for your last paragraph, nice try, but no sale, save it for your classmates at school.

Pro-dope libertarians equate dope-smoking to eating. A simple experiment should prove whether their equivalence is well-placed. I will forego dope-smoking for, say, 60 days, if a pro-dope libertarian will forgo eating for the same period.

Heck, let's even agree to ignore the 40+ year's head-start I have on my end of the test.

Ready, steady, GO!