Thing is, I've not suffered any consequences from indulging my pleasures. By healthist standards I do just about everything wrong, eating the wrong foods but especially my smoking. And yet I'm healthy, the proper weight and never been in a hospital. So what in the hell can the health nazi's offer me if I changed my evil ways? What, 3 more drooling years?

As for me I see the following all the time and it drives me nuts: people using moral words to describe what should be neutral at worst lifestyle options. For example, "I was bad today; I had cake" or "smoking is wrong". Excuse me. Robbing a bank is bad. Murdering is wrong. Shooting up a school or workplace is wrong. For people to assign such morality to eating and smoking is not only stupid but disrespectful to the victims of actual wrongs. That's my two cents anyway.

I grew up in the Catholic Church, and one thing that irritated and annoyed me was when people gave up idiotic things for Lent, like candy or Cokes.

If Jesus did exist, why on Earth would he care whether or not someone ate candy or drank Cokes for a month? Who got any real benefit from this "sacrifice?" No one! It was like making up sins when you went to Confession; as long as you were following the ritual, no one really noticed that your behavior was irrational and pointless.

Assigning moral connotations to food, alcohol and tobacco use came from religion, based on the idea that some chemicals are pure, others are impure, and you owe it to God to keep the impure ones out of your system because your body actually belongs to God, not you. Also, if you have ever fasted or followed a stringent diet for any length of time, you may notice the experience can impart a feeling of moral superiority and inner strength, almost like a religious experience in and of itself.

Religious people tend to deeply distrust anything associated with physical pleasure. The compulsion to seek out pleasurable experiences is sort of built into the human body; without it, people would have no motivation to eat or reproduce. Yet the pursuit of pleasure often drives people to do irrational, destructive things, such as ruining a long-term marriage for the sake of a little sex. People fear that kind of destruction, so they make laws and impose social sanctions on those who fail to exercise what they feel is an appropriate level of self-restraint.

Even though I'm still young, I'm having a hard time in modern society because I analyze everything and grind it down and usually end up with a non-mainstream view. Ah, well, maybe history will exonerate my opinions.

Trust me, it sure beats "ignorance is bliss." At least you won't be thrown into a state of shock when the real shit hits the fan.

True enough. Metaphorically speaking, the "ignorance is bliss" crowd will be caught in a flood without a boat. Just out of curiousity, when you refer to the shit hitting the fan, do you think things will get better or worse?

And even then, i feel the power has swung so far in their side, that even if we all say enough is enough, it won't matter.