The Blag Switch

These people need a little refresher, I think.  Exodus 32:31-35 (NIV):

31 So Moses went back to the LORD and said, “Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. 32 But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.”

33 The LORD replied to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. 34 Now go, lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish them for their sin.”

35 And the LORD struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made.

Pope Benedict XVI recently came out and claimed that “he who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand.” He also said that only works of God have “solid reality.”

Let me put that another way.  A man who lives in a palace, on what amounts to a 110 acre urban estate, and surrounded by opulence that would make Saudi princes blush had the temerity to say that money sucks and we should all focus ourselves on God.  He leads a religion that claims to denounce conspicuous wealth, and yet his holdings made him over $8,000,000 in the 2000 fiscal year and lives surrounded by the finest amenities life has to offer.

Well I say, you first, Mr. Ratzinger.  If “only God’s word is solid reality”, why don’t you just go ahead and throw open the doors of your palace to Italy’s homeless?  Or sell off your jewels and trappings to feed the starving?  How about tearing down St. Peter’s Basilica and replacing it with shelter for the world’s needy?

Or you could just keep up with your Janus-faced ways and try not be surprised when the rest of the world sees you for the wealth-bestrewn hypocrite you are.  As far as I’m concerned it’s win-win.

Apparently a bunch of people in the Washington, D. C. area are praying at gas pumps, so that God will lower gas prices.  Hundreds of thousands dead in the past month or so from natural disasters (what your insurance company probably calls “Acts of God”) but what God really cares about how much it costs these folks to fill up their tank.

. . . Really?  That’s the kind of God these people want to worship?  One that will kill a bunch of people in the third world, but will intervene to save you some money at the pump?

Fortunately, it looks like that particular version of God doesn’t exist, since gas prices have risen significantly since they started their little experiment in applied theological economics.

You know, I normally see these kinds of prayer actions as quaint, but this one is honestly offensive.  Here they are, disrupting business (so much so that they’ve already been run off at least once, so that they can save a little bit of money.  And I’m sorry, high gas prices are a sign of the end times?  Are you kidding?  If you’re so self-absorbed that you think getting your wallet pinched a little harder when you fill up your car is a sign of the immanent eschaton, then please stop for second.  Now, find a mirror and take a long, hard look in it.  I’ll wait .  .  .

Done?  Good.  Now punch yourself right in your stupid, self-centered face.

Here’s the way it works.  Petroleum companies are human institutions.  They sell a product.  They are free to sell that product at whatever price they want.  If you can’t afford it or don’t want to pay that much for it, then you have a recourse: don’t buy the product.  Don’t go disrupting the business of their resalers and shouting into a void after a deity that didn’t even care to save Chinese schoolchildren from an earthquake.  If he exists, he sure as hell doesn’t care about your fuel expenses.

And if he cares about the status of your gas tank and bank account but not about the lives of innocent children?  Then fuck him.  He’s not worth praying to or associating with.

(Of course, this argument is aside from any theological argument about free will, both the petroleum execs’ freedom to charge whatever they want and our individual freedom not to pay it if we don’t want to.  Somehow I doubt once someone’s to the point of praying in front of a gas pump, they’re probably beyond the point of reasonable theological discourse.)

Hat tip to the always funny Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Perhaps I’m a bit touchy, but as an atheist (not to mention a big believer in the First Amendment and that whole crazy notion of Church-State separation) this pissed me off:

“Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupted atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony Wednesday afternoon before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield and told him, ‘What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous . . . it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!

‘This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God,’ Davis said. ‘Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.’”

She’s not my representative, she represents constituents thousands of miles away from me, but for a civil servant and an employee of the public to behave in such a way is disgraceful.  If Ms. Davis really feels so vehemently opposed to Atheism, perhaps she ought to step down.  Aside from the whole “separation of Church and State” thing we traditionally have going here in the US, if she can’t work with her non-Christian colleagues and constituents, then perhaps she’s not fit for the job.

A more complete transcript is here.

(Hat tip to Thirdpower from Days of Our Trailers and Eric Zorn of Change of Subject.)