The Looter Religion

I was watching The Weather Channel of all things this morning. They were doing a "news" blurb on the big snow fall up in Minneapolis. They were getting sound bites from some of the people who'd had their cars towed because of the snow emergency. One lady said "Towing my car in the middle of the night is a SIN!", not wrong, not unfair, not mean, not even petty. A Sin.

and of course, this got me thinking.

This may be what's so hard for me to understand about that mindset. They've worked so hard to remove religion of any kind from their lives or the lives of anyone remotely near them. Only to replace it with this weird sort of quasi-religious belief that they are some sort of deity. Anything done that hurts/angers/inconveniences them violates the prime commandment of their religion: Thou Shalt Not Not Cater to My Whims.

Interesting religion indeed.

If I understand what happened, and I doubt that I really do, in order to remove one god they had to elevate someone or thing into it's place. Why they thought this would be the best course, I couldn't fathom. But there it is. The most convenient idol at hand was their own ego. I guess it makes sense. Sort of, if you squint really hard and hold your nose.

Mind you, I'm not saying everyone did this, some took on the religion of The Green, or the religion of The Nanny State, or the religion of whatever the talking head tells them the current One True Religion is. But the one commandment still holds true.

The situation is as bad or worse than jihadists and other religious extremists. No matter what you say or how you say it, unless you're in lock step with them and their religion, whatever that may be, you're breaking The Commandment. And The Commandment is the ultimate in personalization.

This is why there can't be anything like reasoned discourse with them. Everything is personal, everything is too emotionally invested for them to talk about anything but the feelings associated with the issue. Everything is self-centric. When you're the god of your universe you don't need to explain why something is, it just is.