Sunday Morning

Ah, Sunday.  More Americans will demonstrate that they suffer from delusional thinking today than any other day of the week.  More Americans will demonstrate their hypocrisy today than any other day of the week.  More Americans will practice the brainwashing of their children today than any other day of the week.  Churchgoers abound and the mythology continues.

I am pretty much unaware of what happens during ceremonies at Mosques and Temples and Synagogues.  But I do know Christianity.

Some folks will go to a church that proclaims the Bible is a holy book, virtually dictated by God and that the words therein must be taken literally.  They are, of course, lying to themselves and others.  The Bible is full of flaws of historical and scientific nature.  Nope, the earth is not flat.  Nope, the sun does not orbit the earth.  Nope, not a good idea to stone adulterers to death.  Nope, the planet is not 10,000 years old, and on and on.  Worse, there is evidence of other great lies:  the Jews were never slaves in Egypt; Herod died 6 years before Jesus was born, the Romans did not conduct a census anytime around the supposed birth of Jesus, etc.  But, these same believers will say that abortion and homosexuality are bad because they interpret some scriptures to say so.  The hypocrisy of these folks is overwhelming to me.  It seems to me if they claim a literal interpretation of a flawless Bible they should not cherry-pick the verses they like and ignore others. 

Sadly, there was no flood and no ark.  There was no parting of the Red Sea.  There was no city where the inhabitants were turned to salt.  No one was ever swallowed by a whale and lived to tell the tale.  It is as though these believers go to church and turn off their brains so that they can believe the impossible.  One wonders why the Bible never mentions the pyramids as they were built before the Old Testament was written.  One wonders why if the Bible is God’s word he did not preserve the original scriptures and only left his followers with copies of copies of the text, each iteration different from the one before.  Shepherds do not tend sheep in December.  And no star can hover over a specific city.

Some folks will go to a church that supports celibacy in the clergy, does not approve of married clergy or homosexual clergy and yet those same churches have huge issues with clergy acting as sexual predators.  Some folks will go to a church that worships rich clergy who claim God wants everyone to be rich despite the clear injunctions against wealth in the Bible.  Some folks will go to church where infants are sprinkled and others will go to a church where young adults and older get dunked in the hot tub in the sanctuary.  Some folks will go to church where they are told how to think politically and the message is always “be conservative”, despite the fact that the message of the New Testament is about as liberal as one can get.  Some folks will go to a church where a bell is rung and crackers turn into human flesh and wine turns into blood and people eat and drink it anyway.  So bizarre.  Cannibalism is against the law but no one ever gets arrested.

And some folks will go to church where people believe they are vested with the presence of a spirit and they begin to talk in gibberish and dance and roll on the floor.  Some folks will go to church where they believe vaccinations are evil and harmful.  Some folks will go to church where handling rattlesnakes is a test of trust in the mythical being.  Some folks will go to church and believe that clergy can heal them from all sorts of ailments, but they never see those same clergy in a hospital.  

And every single one of them will go to a church supposedly established by their omnipotent and all-powerful god and their god needs money.  More money.  Really?  Why doesn’t God just whisper insider trading secrets to the clergy?

So I think all those people putting on their Sunday best and heading out the door, checkbooks in hand, are delusional.  They cannot prove the existence of a god, of a heaven or a hell, of some sort of secret god plan for everyone, the ability of some being to personally hear the requests of 7 billion people, or of a resurrected human being.  How can they possibly believe all that?

But they do.  Worse, they teach their kids to think in every domain but the religious domain.  In that domain the kids are simply taught to believe hogwash and poppycock.

Even worse for me are the people who claim to believe but in no way act as though they have any understanding of what such a belief would mean.  They play golf every Sunday and do not even go to church.  If one is going to be a delusional, hypocritical believer in the supernatural then one should at least act in ways that demonstrate such a belief.

And no, I will be sitting at home today reading about the latest evidence that we are killing our planet and are likely to become extinct.  Wonder how the believers will justify such a plan by their god?