Friday, May 05, 2006

National Day of Prayer

What could my Lord ask of me, that I could answer?

-Sinue-

Honor God at the Courthouse today said the sign out on old Dixie Highway where it runs through Port Salerno. I didn’t and I won’t and I wouldn’t even if I did have some concept of God that might be understood by someone who would go to a courthouse to be seen honoring God by other people who instead of working quietly for justice and the benefit of those less fortunate, were also honoring God.

It’s not just that I think the concept of God is absurd, but the notion that he would be so small as to require or be able to acknowledge such a thing is, like the cosmos, too incomprehensible to be described at all. How great must one be that God would be honored with their presence!

No one went to the Courthouse to honor God; they went each to honor his own religiosity, the sense of belonging to a group; of being on the home team and to honor the sense of supremacy religion gives. To paraphrase the ancient Chinese book, the God you worship is not God and perhaps the God you can worship cannot be God.

The people in the courthouse were honoring themselves for honoring God, honoring themselves for belonging to a country where people gather in a courthouse to do something so absurdly vain as to honor God. If it were not an act of political solidarity and self aggrandizement, perhaps they would simply have waited until dark and spent a quiet hour staring up at the unknowable in the warm Florida night.

Haveil Havalim


5 comments:

Crankyboy said...

They weren't honoring God at the courthouse. They were honoring a traffic ticket or a jury summons or a subpoena or a warrant.

RR said...

"they went each to honor his own religiosity"

This is so true.

Religion is a tool that one group can use to make themselves feel superior to another – as well as to justify their bigotry.

The world would be a better place if people used their grey matter instead of relying on religion.

Capt. Fogg said...

Religion and war and racism and anti intellectualism are all ways to join a club and have a feeling of belonging.

Always a good thing for those who don't belong in a civilized world.

RR said...

Anti-intellectualism is another one...

I'm currently "debating" this guy (Sodium Pentothal) on my and his blog about global warming. His argument is that since the correlation between temp and CO2 levels isn't 1-1, global warming can't be caused by it.

Its amazing these people can feed themselves.

Capt. Fogg said...

Such is the power of faith. They'll believe anyting their side preaches.