August 25, 2008
“First, I want to thank Jesus Christ, my personal Savior, for making all of this possible.” Exact quote. This is from an American woman who had played for the Russian basketball team in the Summer Olympics of 2008. (The hell with the Roman numerals. So pretentious.) Anyway, this woman waxed eloquent about her bronze medal or whatever, but she was not alone in her praise of Jesus when it comes to athletics. Athletes crossing themselves just before the starting blocks were almost the norm. The kisses thrown to heaven after a win were equally commonplace.
But…but…but…I never saw a losing athlete raise hands to the skies and throw kisses to the skies in thankfulness for the results. Why is that, I wonder?
(Brief digression: why is heaven always “up?” Now that we know, well, most of us know, that the Earth is not flat, but rather a sphere, there is no up or down. But True Believers, the whole sphere over, still refer to heaven as “up” and hell as “down” and if that isn’t Stone Age thinking I don’t know what is.)
While I enjoyed some of the Summer Olympics, there are two things about them that bothered me throughout. First, I got very tired of the many gods being thanked at all the events. Second, if it’s a question of my steroids beat your steroids, then we had better redefine The Games. Gods first.
I got tired of God being thanked at every event. At one track event a woman looked like she was bandaged after brain surgery. Her shoulders, neck and head were swathed in white cloth so tightly that she looked like one of those old-fashioned nuns who has only a face squished out for interaction with the world. This female (one assumes?) was a competitor from Bahrain, obviously Muslim. She looked ridiculous, and how she ever qualified to be on any track is beyond me.
Likewise, a male runner finished well enough to move on to the next semifinal and as soon as he passed the finish line he dropped down, head on the ground and ass in the air, to offer a prayer of thanks, apparently to Allah. Again, annoyingly ridiculous. My husband and I were fussy as we watched our taped events, so I didn’t get to see everyone obviously, but the percentage of True Believers was huge and I got fed up with it.
So why, you ask, should I care? Here’s why: these agile Olympic athletes are privileged and pampered. To make the quarterfinals in any event takes training and $$$. Big $$$ for every entrant. To say that Olympic sports should not rank high on any country’s list of priorities is probably true. We are as guilty as anyone except for one thing: we do not have abject poverty throughout the land. Do we have too much of it? Hell, yes! In a nation with our resources we have no business having any poor! None! Of course our finite funds must be spent on bombs and bombers and surface-to-air missiles….well, not now. Sports now. Okay.
So here we have countries, take Ethiopia or Jamaica for examples, with a dreadful child mortality rate, nevertheless spending lots of money to make sure they look good at the Olympics. What sense does that make? And why should your god(s) be concerned with your sprints on the track while turning away, heartlessly, from your dying children?
(From the World Health Organization: Ethiopia has a child mortality rate of 123 per 1000
http://www.who.int/pmnch/countries/ethiopia/en/
and Jamaica at 32 http://www.who.int/countries/jam/en/
compared to the USA which has 8 http://www.who.int/countries/usa/en/
which is still too high, but you get my point.)
Jamaica kicked butt when it came to sprinting! Still, what sort of priorities do those statistics represent for (a) the countries and (b) their God[s]? I’m going to combine Islam’s Allah, Judaism’s God and Christianity’s Triune God (Father, Son & Holy Ghost), which really can’t be done because they’re all so vastly different from each other, mutually contradictory, but which will make this so much easier to write. So then, we have Ethiopian and Jamaican athletes asking God to help them in a sporting event while children in their home countries are dying in droves from starvation and disease. What is wrong with this picture? And I don’t mean to single out Ethiopia and Jamaica. It was everyone. Cuba, Russia, Spain, the USA, everyone. What unbelievable arrogance and self-centeredness! Incredible. The message is clear though. **I** am so frigging important that my God, who intervenes in the daily affairs of humans, will help **ME** win this thing and the hell with the dying children back home. I’m Number One with my God!
This is sad and sick. Religions encourage this narcissistic, egocentric view of the world, and it sucks. “Love thy neighbor” ranks poorly with people like this: **ME** first, and God can think about you later. If he has time. What makes this so ironic is that two runners, for example, in the same heat, just before settling into the starting blocks, would both cross themselves, obviously imploring Jesus to help them. Well, Jesus couldn’t make both win, could he? And naturally there were occasions when neither won. Was Jesus on coffee break or what? The whole idea of an omnipotent God getting involved in human stunts—well, it sucks.
As for steroids, the whole game is new, isn’t it? What really needs to be said? The number of horses who bulked out and somehow managed to beat the tests is far greater than the number who didn’t. Sad, really. It used to be that The Games were a true representation of human physical feats. Now, well, you have to know how to beat the drug tests. One example: You know that little cylindrical thing that holds toilet paper that none of us has a real word for? Well, you can insert a vial of baby urine into that whatever, if your timing is right, and you will present a perfect urine sample to the judges.
Isn’t that cool? You can also stuff a urine sample into a so-called Tampon and pass that off to the judges. Well, I will not be watching next time. It’s all about endorsements of breakfast cereals and sneakers anyway, so who really cares? Apparently, though, Jesus does.
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