We used to be Catholics. Now, as Confucian-Druid-Nietzscheian-Pan worshipers, Sunday mornings are pretty much our own. We have absolutely no idea why we're alive or what happens after we die...hope for the courage to celebrate every aspect of the human condition... remember and learn from those who've gone before...help those here now...leave things a bit better for those who come next. In short, we don't matter.
This is an age of religion. Allah is busily assembling nukes. Yahweh, already having nukes, has turned his attention to constructing a wall through the property he mistakenly sublet three thousand years ago. And Jesus, as we all know, lives in the White House and brings freedom to the world one air strike at a time.
"Faith" said Nietzsche "means not wanting to know what is true." Has there ever been a better description of the Bush administration?
Oh for the days of the Greek gods! They didn't imbue their followers with crazed infallibility. They didn't decree eternal rights and wrongs. They simply took human form and humped their brains out.
Yet in 2006, Danish cartoonists must hide for having drawn pictures, Rachel Corrie's words can't be performed unless her being crushed to death by a bulldozer is placed in a more balanced context, and James Dobson must be treated as though he were sane.
{NOTE: Please don't equate contempt for monotheism's big three with acceptance of things like mormonism or scientology. Mormonism is...what? Angels with pasta-sounding names burying plates, and maybe a couple a' three wives? Scientology? You could devise a better religion spending an afternoon with a small block of hash and an 8-track of Frank Zappa's 'Apostrophe'.}
And so, spotting signs and portents along the way, the chosen happily gallop toward their foreordained destruction/salvation. And those of us who don't believe in any doctrinally defined how-to manual for existence must come along quietly, lest we be seen as out of the mainstream.
How to maintain in a world where Bush and Ahmadinejad stockpile centrifuges while Vidal and Chomsky can't get a cable show?
Surely the least we can do...whenever anyone debating public policy quotes the bible or the torah or the koran in conjunction with the smug certainty of that thought-negating, discussion-ending phrase "god said", would be to smile politely and respond "blow me".
Zeus would be proud.