Mercy

I'm an atheist of the Yossarian school, that is, I hold a low opinion of the deity I don't believe in. But I don't want to dwell on it, I'd just as soon he follow in own inexistent path as I do mine, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

But that's nigh on impossible in our modern USA, any catastrophe will provoke the press to bring the supreme being into the matter. Take the floods in the Midwest, here's CNN doing some holy reporting:

"We're just kind of at God's mercy right now, so hopefully people that never prayed before this, it might be a good time to start," Linn County Sheriff Don Zeller said. "We're going to need a lot of prayers, and people are going to need a lot of patience and understanding."

Evidently Sheriff Zeller's god adds up the number of prayers, and adjusts the universe accordingly. MSNBC runs with the same quote as well.

And then there's my pet peeve, the playing of 'God Bless America' during the seventh inning stretch. I will not stand, and I will not sing, I don't believe in God and would just as soon he didn't bless America. This take-over of a noble tradition, standing for the home team in the middle of the seventh, and standing for the away team at the beginning of the seventh has now been trashed. The brain dead American public will bounce up and down like run amok jack-in-the-boxes if their masters tell them too. Why just in the seventh, why not stand up in between every inning, you morons? And why don't you pray for something useful, like a tight bomb pattern?