Ok, so me and the wife drug a friend to see The Passion tonight. It was, well, neither bad or good, really. But who cares, I am not here to tell you how it was. I think everyone should see it, even if all you get from it was the badly computer added dove. What I am going to talk about is how sad people really are.
Ok, first, I am going to lay out something. I am not a fan of racing. While I love to drive, the idea of watching other people driving in circles does not appeal to me...even if they are driving very fast. It is boring. So, I did not have the attachment to Dale Earnhart that many people did. That being said, when he died, I felt the I'm sorry he died, because he was a living person and not the I did not cry when my parents, whom I loved very much, died, but now I am missing a piece of my soul. Ok, now, we have to go with Jesus... yeah he died a long time before I was ever around, or thought of, so his death did not exactly effect me the same way. I basically got the he died for your sins, so fucking worship him (yeah, raised Catholic), and you know what, I did. But then, I felt fairly religeous as I was growing. Now the last thing that effects my view is location: the midwest. Here people can probably name you about the same number of Nascar drivers as they can biblical figures; however, while they could tell you the track record, engine, and the names of the pit crew for their favorite couple of drives, they probably could not tell you any two books (other than Genisis) from the old testament, and would probably get confused if you told them Jesus was a Jew.
Now, how do these two things effect us, and how are they related? I am going to take the Saturday morning cartoon angle on it...only on Sundays. And yes this will change during the various seasons of the year due to the racing schedule and which holiday it is. But for simplicities sake, we will say the season is on, and it is near Easter. Most people I see on a daily basis spend about as much time watching someone behind the wheel as they do watching a priest behind the alter, and they get a lot more from the driver than they do the priest.
I associate religeous people as relatives, annoying college student groups, and, well, crazy people. Oddly enough, relatives, annoying groups and crazy people are also what I associate racing with. Most of the Catholic community I grew up with I would consider posers. They attended church weekly because people would notice if they missed a sermon. They would not get moved by anything, and within minutes of a reading, they would forget everything about it. Now as for Dale, I know people who had never met him, who called into work because they were too upset by the fact that he died. A guy who drove a car realy fast in circles on TV, causes *cough* God fearing people's emotions to quake, and Jesus' death is just a brief weekly mention.
I can respect people who do not believe in Jesus or God, or who have questions about their beliefs. I, however, do not respect people who claim to be followers of a given religion, and are anything but. I also can not respect the majority of the people who were so defeated by the death of Mr. Earnheart. You did not know him, he did not know you, and if he was not getting paid to be there the day he died, he may well still be alive. Like all of us when we go to our jobs, he was there to get paid. Jesus was there because he was wanted to help everyone else. Aethiest or not, devotion is devotion, and I respect the selfless kind much more.
