Something strange has been happening here in Shalampax. And, until recently, I haven’t been able to explain it. We used to be overrun with cockroaches.
The little buggers thrived here because, although we hated them, we were too lazy to do anything about them. Nobody ever vacuumed or swept their apartments because that was too much work. And extermination? That would require way too much effort.
Rather than feeling shame over our slovenly ways that fostered the cockroach infestation, we tried to boost our self-esteem by telling ourselves that the pests were really pets. Pets have to be fed, don’t they? By leaving food droppings where they lay we were simply feeding our pets, which, of course, was the humane thing to do. We anxiously awaited our commendation from PETA.
Of course, we fooled no one—not even ourselves—and we are generally quite easily fooled, particularly when fooling ourselves provides a useful excuse for a slovenly lifestyle.
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In my last couple of posts (here and here) I told you about some of the disadvantages of worshipping God 148. There are others. For example, She expects us to punish adulteresses by stoning them to death. We are supposed to punish male adulterers by forcing them to gather the stones used to stone the adulteresses. Considering that God 148 has a female God number, We thought it rather strange that women should warrant a far harsher punishment than men for the same crime, but it seems that all of the Gods are misogynists, regardless of their assigned gender.
Stoning is a problem for us.
It’s not that we object on moral grounds. Because God 148 commands it, morals and rational thought don’t come into play whatsoever. It’s just that no loose stones could withstand the strong winds that sweep our island several times a day. Thus, we have no materials that we can use to carry out God 148′s tough-love sentence.
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In my previous post, I told you about some of the pitfalls of choosing God 148 as the one God to worship out of all the infinite number of Gods, but I didn’t mention the worst of it. The praying required when God 148 is your God is unbearable.
The content of the prayers isn’t a problem. Unlike God One, God 148 is a very self-confident deity, secure in Her supremeness. Thus, She doesn’t expect us to regularly sing Her praises and tell Her how great she is. She is well aware of Her Majesty and doesn’t need any mere mortal to remind her of it.
Nor does God 148 require any specific words in prayers to Her. We are free to make it up as we go along, ask whatever we will of Her, and put it in our own words. All Shalampaxians have reputations of being somewhat less inspired beings than long-dead tree stumps. So we were surprised to learn that some of us were quite lyrical and inspiring in our prayers. Praying was almost enjoyable, unlike the tedium of God One’s prescribed liturgy.
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It’s been a very long time since anyone has posted here. I’m sorry about that. Due to a sudden outbreak of mass hysteria, no one felt like writing anything.
That’s a bit misleading, isn’t it? No one in Shalampax has ever felt like writing anything because it is too much like work. But, in the past, we usually couldn’t come up with an adequate excuse to overrule the blackmail that the Prime Minister threatened to use against us if we refused to perform our blogging duties.
Recently, either good fortune or widespread insanity—it’s often difficult to distinguish between the two—gave us an ironclad excuse. Work became against our religion. Literally. And for most of my compatriots it still is.
Let me explain.
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