Jesus Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Generally Sundays around IM Central are pretty melancholy. You can usually find us ensconced on the couch bemoaning the fact that another weekend is about to expire and no one has come to rescue us from the work-a-day world with the promise of fabulous riches if we will just continue to scatter our blogadacious bon mots across the inter toobz. Sigh.

Then we remember we're one of only about 25 people still working in Michigan governor Rick Snyder's entrepreneurial paradise, so we steel ourselves for another week in the salary-man salt mines, grab the remote and engage in a little desultory tee vee viewing. Thinking we'd have to choose between Ice Road Truckers and Hillbilly Hand Fishing, our expectations almost perfectly matched our mood. But wait, what's this? The Discovery Channel is presenting a program titled Did God Create The Universe? hosted by Stephan Hawking.

Whoa, thinks us, this can't be good for god. We know a little about Stephan Hawking and he's all rational this and evidence that. Even the title of the show, "Curiosity" isn't going to be on god's top ten list of neat things humans do because of the whole stay away from the tree of knowledge thing in the garden of Eden. We all know how that turned out. So we watched the show and it wasn't so much that Dr. Hawking was arguing for not believing in god, or that belief in god had a place outside of science; no, his point was that god is irrelevant.

Oh snap!

Well, after the show they had this panel of folks to discuss what Hawking had said. There was a physicist who we're pretty sure had relegated belief in god to the category of tooth fairies and wood sprites. Another physicist who seemed to be sort of on the fence and a theologian who obviously was on the pro-god team.  The talking head moderator opened the session by asking the theologian what he thought of the whole shebang and after babbling on for a minute or two about something inconsequential finished up with the ever popular god is love and hope thing.

Yeah. Tell that to the people in Somalia, thinks us. So they droned on for a bit, largely missing the implications of Hawking's point when the godless physicist says to the theologian if you're going to argue for god acting in the world, that means you have to produce some evidence, otherwise  your god is floating around out there in the cosmos and he doesn't care anymore what's going on around here than Cubs fan cares about pennants.

Now, that struck us as a valid point and we started thinking about what could be construed as god acting in the world. It occurred to us that if there was a god who wanted to act in the world, he would probably do that through his peeps, you know, his team, his posse, his dawgs. Religious folks and so forth. And who is more religious--or more folksy--than Bene the pope, huh? So what's the draped one and his homies been up to lately?

A child protection official for the Catholic Church has been caught with 4,000 pictures of child porn. Father-of-four Christopher Jarvis was arrested after uploading pictures of children being abused to a website. Married Jarvis, 49, a former social worker, was employed by the church following sex scandals about pervert priests.

Hmmm...so if this is god acting in the world, god is a perv? Probably better just to be irrelevant don't you think?

His job was to monitor church groups to ensure paedophiles did not gain access to children in the church’s congregations.

Why? So he could keep the kids all to himself? It appears the catholic church could use some help writing job descriptions.

Church spokesman ­David Pond said: “Mr Jarvis was suspended from his position as soon as the diocese became aware in March of the police investigation."

OK, so if god is acting in the world he's doing it through the police? Man. Takes speeding tickets to a whole new level doesn't it?