by Matthew Sitman
Rick Warren strikes again. His book, The Purpose Driven Life, epitmoized the self-help Christianity genre, and now he has turned to the Book of Daniel for dieting advice. Rob Goodman provides the disheartening details:
Pastor Rick Warren says this is a story about weight loss. The story is the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Daniel, and out of the wealth of details in this two-and-a-half-millennia-old book, Pastor Warren has plucked one in particular as the centerpiece of his church-sanctioned diet.
Daniel, one of the four kidnapped Jewish youths, “resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine,” and chose to subsist on vegetables instead, ending up as healthy as anyone in his captors’ court. So, as Time magazine recently reported, Warren has “launched the Daniel Plan, a comprehensive health-and-fitness program.”
Goodman's assessment of this travesty:
Pastor Warren’s Daniel Plan, and the ugly religious thinking it represents, ought to matter whether you see the Bible as sacred writ or human literature. Warren and his fellow apostles of self-help Christianity have a bible of their own: one in which the strange and foreign—and human—are stripped away, and the shallowly motivational is exalted; one in which the demands of 21st-century America are made the measure of these ancient texts.
The Dish 