Gluttony

I'm reading "The Screwtape Letters" by CS Lewis. It was written in 1942 and is amazingly convicting. One of the chapters addresses gluttony. He makes an interesting point that gluttony has been cleared from the Christian conscience the past 100 years. I'm no math major, but that means that we haven't addressed or talked about gluttony with any seriousness since the mid-1800's as a western society. Interesting.

Dictionary.com defines it as follows: n 1: habitual eating to excess 2: eating to excess (personified as one of the deadly sins) [syn: overeating, gula].

Fairly straightforward.

I'm not sure that gluttony applies only to food. Can we be gluttonous with our money, our possessions, toys, cars, holidays? As the richest nation in the history of mankind, why don't we talk about this more on an individual level? Politically, I'm not sure the government has a place in my wallet any more than they have a place at my dinner table...but let's dream a little...

We've got Dobson filling the role as the beacon of light for Biblical families.

We've got the AFA standing up proud and strong against all forms of mainstreaming homosexuality.

We've got the ACLU getting after the dangers of prayer, nativity scenes and cell phone monitoring that leads to foiled terrorist plots.

Why does no one organize against gluttony? Why is no one encouraging Americans to draw a line accross their net worth chart and make a commitment to help others with the excesses above that line.

And back to the original definition of gluttony...why are we getting fatter and fatter as a society. When we threw out the Bible as the moral compass for society in 1962 I could understand gluttony going away...but according to CS Lewis, we threw out gluttony as a sin 120 years before that...why?