Study finds E-cigarettes don’t help smokers quit

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68. One of the main problems I've faced when trying to quit my habit of smoking cigarettes ...

is that I actually enjoy smoking them. I enjoy smoking a good cigar even more.

I feel that smoking nicotine enhanced water vapor is most likely far less dangerous for my health than inhaling the 3000 chemicals in a cigarette.

Another positive point is an e-cigarette actually has a far better taste to me than either a cigarette or a cigar. I also no longer walk around smelling like an ashtray.

If I wish, I can order e-cigs or e-cig juice that has a lower level of nicotine than the ones I currently use. I can reduce the amount of nicotine in the vapor to zero if I wish.

My doctor recommended that I try e-cigs and I'm damn glad I took his advice.

There does seem to be an amazing number of people in our nation who favor banning anything that they see other people enjoying. I sometimes wonder if this is caused by the influence the early Puritan settlers had and still has on our society.

The Legacy of Puritanism

Emory Elliott
University Professor of University of California,
Distinguished Professor of English and
Director, Center for Ideas and Society
©National Humanities Center

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to trace the effects of seventeenth-century New England Puritanism upon the development of the United States of America. Many scholars have argued that various elements of Puritanism persisted in the culture and society of the United States long after the New England Puritanism discussed in the following pages was recognizable. However, many of the verbal formulations that the early Congregational and Presbyterian clergy devised as ways to imagine themselves as a special people on a sacred errand into the wilderness of a New World have been sustained in the social, political, economic, and religious thinking of Americans even to the present. Two leading literary and cultural scholars of New England Puritanism and its legacy, Harvard Professors Perry Miller in the 1940s and 50s and, more recently, Sacvan Bercovitch, the studied the rhetorical strategies of the New England Puritans and demonstrated the remarkable extent to which the leaders and clergy created a rich American Christian mythology to describe their Providential role as the new Chosen People in world history. Passed down through generations to our own time, many assumptions regarding God’s promises to his chosen American People have persisted through the American Revolution, the Civil War, and all periods of crisis down to our own time. Still visible in much religious and political rhetoric in United States are versions of the grand narrative of the Reverend Cotton Mather’s prose epic, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), where he proclaims: “I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Deprivation of Europe, to the American Strand.” This vision of a Christian American utopia was first expressed by John Winthrop in his writings in the 1630s and remains alive in many religious and political forms in the United States today. [For more on the Puritans, see: Puritanism and Predestination.]
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/legacy.htm

Puritanism, Paternalism, and Power

“LIVE AND LET LIVE” would appear to be a simple, sensible guide to social life, but obviously many Americans reject this creed with a vengeance. They find toleration so unpleasant that they support the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of indviduals whose personal behavior they regard as offensive. Why do so many Americans favor the use of coercive sanctions to enforce repression? The answer lies in our history.

Puritanism

Politicians and other patriotic posturers like to declare that the Europeans came to America seeking freedom. The claim is at best a half-truth. In the colonial era, most Europeans arrived in North America bound in some form of indentured servitude. Disregarding these servants, one finds that the free colonists sought mainly to im- prove their economic well-being.

To be sure, some of them, including the early arrivals in Massachusetts, were fleeing religious oppression. But the Pilgrim Fathers had absolutely no intention of establishing a community in which individuals would be free to behave according to the dictates of their own consciences. The Puritans had already seen the light, and by God they intended to use all necessary means to ensure that everybody comply with Puritan standards. Far from free, their “City upon a Hill” was a hardhanded theocracy.

For them, pleasure seemed the devil’s snare. Their vision of the good life was austere, and they looked askance on the possibility that others might embrace hedonism. In H. L. Mencken’s famous characterization, Puritanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” (A Mencken Chrestomathy. New York: Vin- tage Books, 1982, p. 624). Moreover, if the Puritans suspected that someone might be having fun, they had no compunction about using government coercion to knock some sense into the offender. Mencken might have had this proclivity in mind when he observed, “Show me a Puritan and I’ll show you a son-of-a-bitch” (p. 625).
http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_02_3_higgs.pdf