In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to share with you some information all good Irish Catholics should already know, namely that the Vatican has announced brand new ways for you to ensure your soul languishes in the unquenchable flames of Hell for all eternity. If you ask me, this is long overdue. As an Irishman myself, I find that I have far too few avenues through which to channel my innate self-destructive tendencies. Sure, I'm slowly drinking myself to death, and I remain an emotional cripple, but on the spiritual front my near-pathological sense of Catholic guilt keeps me from enjoying the truly heinous sins that are every independent soul's right, the kind of stuff that makes God level your entire city or flood the planet. Old Testament wrath, angels of death, flaming swords, pillars of salt--you know, the kinds of stuff that, when shared with your children at an appropriately impressionable age, can effectively keep them from masturbating for at least two to three years after discovering what touching their no no spot can produce.
With this new announcement, though, certain everyday behaviors of mine are suddenly steeped in delicious new layers of depravity, finally granting me that spiritual bad boy image I've craved for so long. For instance, cloning is now officially a sin, as is drug abuse and destroying the environment. While I've always suspected that smoking crack was tacitly frowned upon by my parish priest, the other two have completely caught me by surprise. Now, when I routinely fly down to South America with an army of clones, order them all to ingest suicidal amounts of PCP, and then see how much tropical rain forest they can chop down before their hearts explode in their soulless chests, I'm suddenly committing a sin. Eternity of gruesome yet ironic torment, here I come!
Other additions seem somewhat beside the point. Sure, when you clone yourself or your neighbor's super hot teenage daughter, you're playing God and thus I can see the sin angle. Ironically, actually donning a flowing robe and a fake white beard to indeed play God is somewhat hazy ground, at least according to the Church Fathers. Less hazy ground is donning said outfit and then standing on the side of the road and swirling around every time someone honks their horn at you, like a nice gentleman habitually does on my drive home. That goofy bastard is gonna burn. But I digress. Ignoring social injustice when one has the financial means to do otherwise (that seductively easy sin of inaction) is apparently a sin now, which I'm fine with. The funny thing, though, is that one article I read interpreted this sin as "being filthy rich." I think this writer is missing the point, though, because if I have obscene amounts of money, it'll be a sin because I'm snorting coke off the back of prostitutes and hunting homeless people on my own private island, not simply because I have a large amount of money in my offshore accounts from the clone logging operation I have running out of Brazil.
In the end, though, I tend to look at sin like cancer: pretty much anything you do causes cancer one way or another, and pretty much anything you do could be construed as a sin, if only from a certain perspective. Well, at least everything I do, though I still maintain telling strangers "That was a stupid thing to say and you're a stupid person for saying it" is neutral ground. And while this point may be overly macabre, I'd still like to think this has a little something to do with why the Irish have such a good sense of humor: when you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, you might as well have a pint and a laugh in the process. And if you're lucky, maybe you can convince St. Peter that it's the guy behind you in line (who happens to look exactly like you) who tinkered with the human genome, clubbed a seal, and did all that meth. Hell, it's worth a shot, isn't it?
Slainte.
No comments:
Post a Comment