I sometimes envy people who follow tradition without asking questions. They gain benefits from their tradition that the rest of us will never know. (There are costs, of course, to their lack of questioning, as there are to everything, but that's another story.)
We questioners can't help but smell some problems with Lent. We note how back in the Middle Ages, for example, Thomas Aquinas recommended abstaining from meat because it produced more semen (in fifty percent of the population), which (of course) produces more lust. We recall how for many centuries of Christian history, the popular assumption seemed to be if something made you happy, God was against it, so the best way to make God happy was by keeping yourself less so. A few people may still feel this way, but thanks to modern marketing and the religious-industrial complex, most of us have bowed to the orthodoxy that God is as obsessed with us and our constant personal happiness as we are.
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