itsalwayssomething

This is the most exciting literature I have read this year, aside from the Philosophy of Probability.  Bruce Bickel and Stan Jantz have done an excellent job in narrowing down the problems with the religion of Christianity.

I love it.

I’m only a quarter of the way through, but I love their recognition of how modern day Christians have marginalized themselves to modern day Pharisees, little projectionist Bible thumpers that do nothing but destroy themselves, their church, and their religion. 

As a Christian, I see the hypocrisy every time I leave a sermon (not that hard to do when you go to church in puissant little Cary).  You can see the buyer’s remorse in people’s eyes as they consider whether or not they want to tithe or save up for a BMW.  You’ve got kids there that do nothing but socialize and girls that wear hooker boots and makeup to church.  Nice.

Truth be told, every Christian and non-Christian needs to read it.  Perhaps I will pirate it.

If you analyze the church on a balance sheet, you could make the Enron guys crap their pants.  This is genius in its pure form, the first intelligent thing I have seen in America since social networking and user-generated content.  What better way is there to maximize your profits than by “volunteer work” and placing a Starbucks into a house of worship?  If the “Big Three” operated like a sanctuary, taxpayers wouldn’t have to take out a third toxic mortgage on their overpriced and inefficient homes so they could support companies that make overpriced and inefficient vehicles.

Realistically, for anyone to take a church or religion in general, seriously, there has to be a sense of sacrifice.  I suppose it’s much easier to retrieve and maintain followers if you tweak your doctrine to follow the American dream.

On a side note, I am a Christian, but I am also a skeptic, which is really a sucktastic dichotomy.

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I am originally from Prince George’s County, Maryland which is one of the nation’s best for petty theft and murder rates, only rivaled by perhaps Detroit and South Central Los Angeles.  The entire place looks crappy, but some of the people there are the nicest, smartest, and most creative people you can meet.

Three hundred miles away is one of the nicest looking areas in America, only the people are crappy.  Cary, North Carolina is one of the most affluent areas per capita for a city of its size, but the people are mean, snobby, and entirely unfunny.  It’s a bunch of cookie cutter houses and cookie cutter wives with children so bland it makes Stepford look like a Renaissance.

I beg the crappy people of crappy suburbs to do something about this immediately and make the most of the infinite opportunity that is handed to you on a silver platter by your butler.

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Growing up in Prince George’s County, I was used to seeing the poor, the struggling, the destitute.  I knew how to recognize homeless people and how to avoid them.  In my childhood, I had always wondered how someone can join the bottom rung of society and during my senior year in college, I found one of the many avenues it takes to become homeless.

The odd thing about all this is that I was always a hard worker in school.  I was on the good side of many teachers and always pushed myself to perfection and beyond.  Yet, at the beginning of 2008, I found myself struggling for survival.  How did I fall so far?  In short, a girl.  But really, she was just the beginning of the fall of the house of cards onto the dominos of my life.

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Morgan State?  MORGAN STATE?  The game was playing in College freaking Park! Fire Gary Williams, immediately.  As a Terps fan and a Pack fan, I am at the end of my rope for watching two programs fail so miserably.

Sidney Lowe still has time to recover, but Gary, you are past your prime.  You brought the program back from the grave, won the national title, the ACC championship, and beat Duke more than anyone, but all good things must come to an end.  And when they don’t, they must be fired.  Besides, now you’ll have more time to play golf with Jim Boeheim.

When a five year old girl tells you that something is stupid, then you have a textbook case that whatever you told the little cherub is absolute nonsense.  Unfortunately, that didn’t happen to me, but a friend of mine.  However, the principle remains the same as I had to endure the painstaking process of explaining post-season college sports to my remarkably athletically illiterate girlfriend (not that it’s hard to explain all of it, but I did have to start from scratch).

I made it easy on myself explaining the tournament system and then working my way up from Division III to Division I and then to the Division I-A (aside: screw the name “FBS”) football system.  I traversed through the meanings of upsets and rankings and the regular season and how it added up to conference tournaments and championships and how it led to schools are fighting for national meaning and eternal glory for players, coaches, and fans.

Then, I had to blank that slate and talk about the BCS.

The Bowl Championship Series, where money and politics decide who will be crowned the national champion in all of college football “where every game of the week matters.”  Pfft.  This statement is the acceptable mantra of ESPN which only further propagates this senselessness.  To top it off, ESPN bought out all the bowl games making them the Microsoft of college football.

As a writer, it is at this point that I make a case for all of us to rise up and defeat this beast.  However, I’m not sure there is anything to be done.  My hours of browsing through crappy forums and crappy columns has only presented the opportunity of “waiting it out”.

So, comrades, let us shout at our plasma screens and vote on nonscientific online polls until our office pools bleed.

Come on 2014!

PS: Screw you ESPN.

Would I do it all over again?  This was conjectured by one of my best friends over the course of our fancy value menu dinner.  The question was out of nowhere, our conversation being on the State-Carolina rivalry, which is weird, but I tried to answer the question the best I could. 

To be honest, yes, I would.  I wish I knew then what I knew now.  My situation is rather weird.  It feels as if I was one tax bracket away from success.  Any kind of success.  Struggling is fine and griping about it is okay in small doses, but eventually you have to overcome it and I always thought I would be out of the muck by college.

Maybe tomorrow.