Summer Rant

My wife has left me for ten days. She is taking her best friend on an Alaskan cruise to celebrate said friend's retirement. So I've been left to do the grocery shopping unaided.

We've let the fridge clear out in anticipation of Sally's trip, so tonight I went to the local Publix in search of bachelor chow. Tonight's dinner will be a simple repast of a french cheese whose name I can not recall and ritz crackers, followed by watermelon for dessert.

While in Publix I discovered something, that for me, provides the key to modern America. You can buy many different brands of instant iced tea mix, but they all have sweetening. Most have sugar, or possibly high fructose corn syrup, some have saccharin, some have nutrasweet, fewer have splenda and one lonely brand had stevia, I think. But you can not buy unsweetened instant tea.

I'm lazy. Boiling water requires work and effort. Pouring water over tea flavoured pellets is far less tiring. I don't much care about the taste as I going to add lemon juice to it anyway, so the better taste of freshly made hot tea isn't an issue.

But do all of our beverages have to be sweet? I drink, in no particular order: Tap water, orange juice, coffee, milk, an occasional lemonade when it is truly hot, and iced tea. If we are having a sit down dinner, I may have beer or wine. Of those beverages, only orange juice and lemonade can be classified as sweet. None of them would be foreign to Americans of fifty years ago.

But what you see in the grocery store is an endless array of sweetened beverages. No wonder we're all fat.

Pot Pie

When I was a boy my mother would often make dinner by reheating frozen pot pies in the oven. That's not a criticism. To this day, I love chicken pot pies. The problem lay in that Mom buys things that are on sale or have the lowest price without regard to quality. I am prone to similar behaviour. This apple did not fall far from the tree.

As a child I noticed that the pot pies that were completely encased in crust were usually pretty good. The ones that were chicken cobblers, that is without a bottom crust were always awful.

We recently picked up a large box of pot pies at a discount warehouse. They are fully encrusted and are quite tasty. One of them is a satisfying meal. The other pot pies do not have a full crust and, as was true in childhood, are less desirable. They also do not fill me up. After consuming one, I'm always hungry. Which means that an hour or two after mealtime I find something to snack on. The snack is always something unhealthy and is usually something I do not really want.

I think that modern religion can be analogized to pot pies. Real religion, that is to say historical and orthodox Christianity is self contained and is spiritually satisfying. It provides a varied experience. Modern religion, that practised by many mainline churches, is religion without a complete crust. In an effort to make it available to more people, the ingredients have been reduced and cheapened. It provides less calories and nutrients, so that it can never fully satisfy. Its consumers either abandon it for fast food religion or supplement it with unhealthy spiritual snack food.

Like all analogies, this one breaks down if pushed too far. But it does explain why lowering the cost of faith does not actually result in more adherents.