Poor sad consumerist infidels

I have this obstinate cold that is being very slow about going away. While it’s packing its things and checking its passport, it sometimes wakes me up in the night by making me cough so hard that it murders sleep. It did that last night at 2 a.m., so I got up and had some lemon zinger tea and listened to the World Service for an hour and then went back to sleep. This means I had the thrill of hearing a program called ‘Heart and Soul’ which on this occasion was about God and football. It was mind-bogglingly stupid.

There was some vicar doing most of the talking, and he sounded like an adult and everything, but he talked the most ridiculous childish nonsense as if it were perfectly normal and reasonable. He simply assumed that believing in something called ‘God’ is unremarkable and entirely sensible. He and everyone else had the most inane ideas about what this ‘God’ adds to football.

Apparently they find it thrilling and exciting to think that when a player does something remarkable, it is God making the player do it. Why? Why would that make it more thrilling rather than much less thrilling? There was a passage on a goal-keeper who did something called a scorpion kick, and they were all excited about saying that was God. But when a human does something extraordinarily agile or graceful or beautiful or difficult or all those – why isn’t it exciting that the human did it? Why would it be more exciting to say a hidden magician caused the human to do it? Why do they think ‘God’ adds something? It’s beyond me.

There was also lots of patronizing stuff about how believers can see that football has multiple facets and secular people can’t, and about how in the absence of ‘God’ there is only consumerism. Stupid, untrue, shallow, calumnious shit like that. It made me cross.

I still went back to sleep though. Can’t complain.

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