I have found C.S. Lewis especially freeing in regard to pleasure in this life. Since I can't quote the whole section, I will use an extended quote to provoke you towards Lewis.
The original meaning of temperance "referred not to specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. . . . One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself with wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons--marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things a re bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning. . . . A man who makes golf or his motor-bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as 'intemperate' as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals."
--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, "The Cardinal Virtues"
Do you feel the freedom Christianity offers regarding pleasure--both from excess and from avoidance? How should we then live?
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