God and Country

There's supposed to be a difference between them, but to the religiously demented, who will swoon over a rust stain on a wall or a piece of burnt toast, any image containing intersecting lines is proof not only of an omnipresent deity, but one who is his own father and born of a teenage mother through the agency of a bird.

Try this at home. Shine a bright light through a bedsheet and you'll see that because the sheet is made of millions of threads at right angles to each other, you will see the bright light as a cross. It's not magic. Photographers use a fine screen to make bright lights look like stars in night shots all the time. It doesn't mean that God is in the headlights or sitting on a lamp post and if you think it does, that means you've been made stupid by religion. I promise that you will see the same cross pattern in a French flag or a Pirate flag or a soiled sheet from the Mustang Ranch. It means that God is present to the same extent that a stalagmite in some cave represents the virility of Vishnu. What this piece of cloth does not mean and what the person who sent it to me does mean, is that the United States of America is intended to be a religious colony with laws derived from legend, which values its citizens by their degree of departure from reason and is ruled not by the citizens, but by the viceroys of a mythological triumvirate invented by 4th century Roman pagans.

So when I got this piece of religious drivel in my e-mail this morning, I elected to follow its advice to non-believers. "If you don't believe God is watching over us, then delete it." I did, but not before posting it here.

Sinclair Lewis, the Nobel prize winning author wrote: "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." It's arrived.