And in Religious News Today

Hardly anything important of a secular nature seems to be occurring lately, unless you count the Governator's motorcycle accident and resultant fat lip. This is a particularly Pat Robertsonian perspective. If God is not involved, than an event has no purpose. Robertson, who was once a serious Republican Presidential candidate, has recently (today in fact) been labeled "Off the deep end" by 87% of AOL correspondents. Even the Israelis, who have benefitted (temporarily, until the Second Coming) by the financial support of his band of Christian Fundies, have kissed him off, after he announced that God punished Ariel Sharon with a massive stroke for daring to consider Palestinian statehood.

The Israelis, of course, have reason to be sensitive, though the question always arises as to how intense their defensiveness can be before it becomes uncomfortably obnoxious. Still, the issue of worldwide anti-Semitism continues unabated, even worsening with the stupefying cavalcade of lies and revisionist history perpetrated by enemies as diverse as Iran and Mel Gibson's father. In some future blog I will enunciate why I believe that anti-Semitism is the stupidest and most self-defeating of all humankind's stupid prejudices, and says the worst about our species. But like cockroaches and Republican scandals, it just goes on and on. Yesterday there was a serial stabbing of twelve worshippers by a 20-year-old neo-Nazi in a Russian synagogue. Even though the entrenched anti-Semitism of the Russians has been swept under the rug to the extent that a Menorah was lighted in a Moscow square this year, popular idiocy persists, causing the Jews in the world to recoil and retrench in their firmness.

I'm not sure what Pat Robertson's take will be on the incident yesterday when 345 Moslem pilgrims were crushed to death on their annual Hajj as they tried to cross a bridge to attend a stone-throwing ritual meant to ward off the devil. It's really hard to write that sentence with a straight face, if one will pardon the mixed metaphor. I guess there could be several interpretations of the event. One is that there are now 345 fewer potential terrorists. Another is that it was all a part of the International Jewish Conspiracy as plotted by the Elders of the Protocol of Zion. Pat Robertson would probably declare that it is God's punishment for refusing to eat ham.

I'd like to know, what's with these catastrophic human stampedes? They seem to happen annually in Mecca. They are the equivalent of a bus plunges in India and tornadic wipeouts of trailer parks in Oklahoma. God surely seems to wake up on the wrong side of the bed a lot. If it isn't his doing, then maybe it's nature telling these people that they they shouldn't be having so many children or try to squeeze their teeming millions into inhospital climes or atop narrow rickety bridges.

Even more profoundly, I'd like to consider what the news would be like if either 1) there was universal tolerance of all religions, as supposedly proposed by their how-to manuals, or 2) religion were not god-oriented but nature-oriented, so that we all shared the same awareness of the greater powers that rule over us. In either case there would be no Hajj, no 9/11, no synagogue rampage, and best of all, no Pat Robertson. Or there would be as Pat Robertson, but he'd be doing what he seems better qualified for, which is serving up fries at Burger King.