Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!
There is burning stupid we can mock, and then there is the kind of atomic burning stupid that you really would mock if its results were not so tragic.
Take this story coming out of Switzerland, by way of a for instance. A woman in her 50s starved to death because she decided to stop eating and drinking and was living instead on sunlight…you know, like her blood wasn’t made of hemoglobin but chlorophyll. Why did she think that this would work? Because she watched some moronic film about a Indian guru who claims to have lived without food or water for 70 years.
No, this was not a story from the Onion. It was real. This woman died because of a fanatical belief in a (painfully obvious) fraud. The human body is an amazing thing. It can adapt to all kinds of stressful situations. People have gone without food during fasts for 20 days or more. (although you can bet they were not in great health by the end of it.) But that cannot last for long. And you cut water out of the equation and well, that time frame gets reduced from weeks to days at best. In short, no one lives long without fuel. Certainly we cannot live on sunlight. Cause you know, we aren’t plants. And even plants need water.
The poor woman died. Wasn’t there anyone around, friends or family to look out for her? Wasn’t there a neighbour or something who said “Hey, Alice from 3b is looking a little on the crypt keeper side of things lately, huh? Maybe we should check on her?”
I am honestly not sure what is more pathetic about this story: That someone could be so taken in by obvious hokum that they died, or it seems that no one was around to notice she was wasn’t eating and was wasting away.