The deadly sin we want to consider today is the sin of gluttony. This comes from the Latin word which means to swallow or gulp down. The idea of there being 7 deadly sins is not an inspired one, and it is at this point that I would contend that gluttony is probably not a valid candidate for even the traditional definition of a deadly sin that of being a gateway sin, a cardinal sin, and therefore one of the deadly sins that leads to other sins. It is true that the first sin in the bible was a sin related to food, but it was not the sin of gluttony but the desire to be like God that lay at the heart of it. In my research of the roots and development of this sin it seems clear to me that there was an outside influence of asceticism that informs the choice of gluttony. The early church was not always able to disentangle itself from some of the baggage of Greek philosophy and other bad thinking. This was especially true as it related to matters of the body. Greek philosophy usually saw a human being as a mind/soul trapped in a body, the body was not good though fallen it was all bad; it was the job of the mind using the will to rule the body and not vice versa. Beastliness and therefore to be sub-human was to be driven by these natural drives and not by the pursuit of virtue and the intellectual leading of the mind. Giving into desire in general was weakness, this led to all sorts of caricatures like women being weak because they are the more emotional sex, and men being strong because they are the more intellectually detached. This bled into Christianity...

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