Anorexia is a serious mental illness that wastes your body as it ravages your self-image. Some people find it a display of piety to simply not eat for forty days, mimicking all the mental illnesses that lead anorexics to the same behaviour. This is disturbing, especially when you can see them waste away and their already religiously-degraded mental functions dissipate over time. This video, via Andrew Skegg, is disturbing in exactly that way, especially when viewed in its proper context.

This woman is starving herself repeatedly over three forty-day fasts, engaging in anorexic behaviour by ingesting nothing but a multivitamin and water, breaking the fast with a week of Passover-kosher food then repeating the cycle, all for the purpose of getting in good with a deity that very probably does not exist. And on the chances that it does, it very probably does not care that you have starved yourself for so long out of supplication.

Below the fold. Trigger warning for anorexics.
Continue reading “Fasting Away To Nothing for an Imaginary Deity” →