On Fasting

Today marks the beginning of Lent, this is the closest thing Christians get to fasting.  For Catholics, no meat is allowed today, Ash Wednesday or on Good Friday two days before Easter. The entire forty days of Lent are also a time of 'fasting' where something is generally given up in your life.  The goal is to improve yourself through sacrifice, through fasting.  Many other world religions perform fasting, most much more intense than the requirements of Lent.  Muslims cannot eat at all while the sun is up during the whole month of Ramadan. Many Buddhists are not meant to eat on the first and fifteenth day of each month.  And people have been fasting for probably as long as people have been eating.

Fine, so the question is why? And does fasting have any relevance for modern believers who value reason and science as central concepts in their religious view of the universe.  Does a Bayesian believer fast? 

The answer of course is "they can if they want to". But does it make any sense?

Fasting is often performed as a symbol of sacrifice and love for God.  It may be meant to show God that the believer is so committed to their faith that they are willing to go against one of the most basic drives of their body - hunger.

Think about the significance of this act in ancient times when food was scarce and there were no supermarkets to bring you food out of season from around the world.  To refrain from eating weakens you, opens you up to danger and disease.  But they did it anyways, because they felt that in some ways being hungry actually made them stronger.  Recent scientific studies would tend to agree with this ancient wisdom at least in some ways. 

Studies have shown the long held suspicion that hunger brings greater alertness and improves memory.  Other studies have also shown that hunger can lead to an  extended lifespan, at least in mice.  Ancient people didn't really have much issue with being overweight but perhaps they gathered circumstantial evidence over time that periods of hunger raised awareness, improved learning and memory and tended to lead to longer life.

Fasting is also often described as cleansing for the soul.  By resisting the desire of our body to eat we are asserting control of our mind over our body and pushing away the raw, insatiable hunger of our bodies bred by evolution to eat whenever the opportunity arises, lest the chance does not come again for a long time.  This is a psychologically powerful act, to overcome your bodies wishes and impose something on it that you know is good for it.  Exercising has a similar effect to this.  We are forcing our body to exercise or eat less, knowing that it will make it stronger.  But the body resists with pain, aches and the will must overcome it.  When we succeed and run that marathon or complete that fast we feel accomplished.  We feel stronger.

So perhaps the ancients weren't crazy to fast.  These are all good reasons to fast right here, today, given everything we know about ourselves.  We don't have to fast because God said its a sin to eat meat on fridays or during ramadan.  We can fast because its good to challenge ourselves.  To focus the division between body and mind and show body who's in charge in the body-mind relationship. 

Now a reasonable believer should find it odd that God, creator of the heavens and the earth and Master of the universe should care that we do not eat meat on fridays or do not eat while the sun is up during a particular month.