I gave up smoking in 1978 when I became a Christian. Or, rather, God gave it up on my behalf. Before that, I smoked cigarettes – Gauloises were my favourite – a pipe and cigars. All inhaled. On numerous occasions I tried to give them up, to no avail.
I started smoking in university in my existentialist phase: life is meaningless, I decided. Smoking was something to do and trying to give it up gave one a purpose, so why not start. I was right to some extent: trying to give it up did give me a purpose; nevertheless, it was an exercise in futility because I couldn’t manage it.
When I became a Christian, one of my first prayers was to give up smoking. The day after, I woke up a non-smoker: I didn’t want to smoke and still don’t.
That preamble is a longwinded way of saying that I think smoking as a pastime is a bad idea. Still, the following is especially silly:
It is the opening screen to the latest Indiana Jones film.
In most films today we are subjected, without notice, to smooching lesbians, actors and actresses frolicking unclothed in bed, blood, gore, random violence, and the imbibing of unspecified drugs though needles, fumes and inhalation. Almost no film is released without a token homosexual, lesbian, bisexual or sadomasochist. But we simply have to be warned about smoking – tobacco, of course, because marijuana smoking, now legal to buy, sell and use in Canada, is completely harmless.
I think I saw just one lit cigarette in the film.
One thing that gives me hope for an eventual general cessation of sexual vice is that society’s view of smoking has indeed undergone such a widespread change in my lifetime that it’s outlawed as a habit in so many places.
I have never come to understand why an individual would pay tobacco companies to kill them. It is well established that the use of tobacco and other illicit drugs shorten one’s life.