de rerum natura: a call to repentance<br>or that's ғЦ¢χїπ§ ßЦ||$&!+

I would like to say that basically, I'm a $&!++y person. I'm not very nice; I'm crude; I'm self-centered, etc... I do very few things "religiously." In fact, I would say that I have almost no personal pietisms. I don't feel the need to avoid work on Sundays, blended fabrics or shellfish; to protest "Desperate Housewives;" or necessarily, to stone children who disobey their parents. I attempt to make it to church every so often—although I have to credit my wife with getting my lazy @$$ out of bed most Sundays—and I do sing in the choir when not visiting friends or family or bass-fishing. (I'm lying, I don't bass-fish.)

However I read this article—

http://www.readthehook.com/stories/2006/01/12/essayamerican.html
which was reprinted from this article—

http://www.motherjones.com/news/exhibit/2005/12/exhibit.html
and I almost had a coronary brought on by self-righteous moral hyperventilation.

Anyways, it's always easy to get your moral high dudgeon all twisted up in a knot when someone else doesn't practice the type of personal piety that you do. And the one thing that Janna and I have done as a matter of legalistic piety is to dispense TEN PERCENT of our income (before taxes, people) to what we consider to be worthy religious organizations and non-profits. This is what caught my eye...

2 IN 3 American households say they give to charity, at an average of $1,262 a year. But only 1 in 3 households report charitable deductions to the IRS.

IN 2002, Americans deducted $654 million for cars they donated to charity—7 times what the cars were actually worth.

ON AVERAGE, Americans think that 24% of the federal budget goes toward foreign aid. Only 0.9% actually does.

FOUR YEARS after Bush founded the Millennium Challenge Corporation to reward Africa’s best-run countries and pledged to fund it by $5 billion a year, the MCC has disbursed only 1% of that amount.

ASKED ABOUT doubling African aid, Bush said, “It doesn’t fit our budgetary process.”

Of course, when I read that, my first thought was, I'm going to stop giving my money, đ@μμ!+. Just think about the Benjamins that we could be counting right now if we had all of that money back. Janna and I could be living in a nice house in the suburbs.

Then I thought about how so many Falwells and Robertsons get worked up about approximately eight verses in the Bible dealing with homosexuality when we're living in a self-centered land that almost completely ignores the vast majority of Jesus' teaching.

Then, all the self-righteous ßЦ||$&!+ from Republicans who tell us that the government needs to give tax dollars back to individuals who will use it far more wisely than the government. As I stood in line behind a person of lower socio-economic status buying cancer sticks at Food Lion today, my head almost exploded with righteous indignation.

To quote Green Day,