Religion under Duress

It could not happen at a worse time,
Christmas and all! Danger, danger, danger!

I always thought it a cruel practice,
but students at Luther College used to go out at night
to dairy farms, where the cows were often found
to be dozing while standing upright.
The students would run at the unsuspecting cows
from the side, give them a huge bump,
and tip the over. "Cow tipping" they called it.

Now someone in Italy,
said to be somewhat deranged,
probably a former Luther College student,
has instuted "Pope tipping".
For the second year in a row,
she ran at the Pope, about to celebrate Mass,
and tipped him over. Last year she missed.

The reports do not indicate whether Benedict XVI
was sleeping on his feet, but in his sermon
he urged the faithful to be vigilant.

Now, out in Colorado, another church
assembled the cast for one of those "living creches",
including two real donkeys, kept in a pen at night.

They ran away. They wanted nothing to do
with . . . well, I don't really know . . .
with religion, I assume.
The Colorado faithful tracked them down,
following their trail in the snow,
and brought them back to the faith.

And Catholic Hospital associations have urged
Congress to pass a Senate-like health care bill.
Catholic bishops have been opposing the bill,
arguing that a woman should not have the right
to choose whether or not to have an abortion
if public money is involved. The bill does not say
anything about buggering altar boys.

I don't know. . . .
I don't think medical professionals
should meddle with the medical expertise
of the bishops. Hospitals should stick
to what they know best: the nutritional value
of communion wafers.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog