Wurd!

I awoke very early this morning largely due to pain in my broken toe. The toe has now swollen even further and it appears that my foot has seen fit to follow suit. I think there may be a chance that I have broken a bone in my foot as well, because it just doesn’t feel right.

I’m not the best sleeper in even perfect slumber circumstances, so it is usually a safe bet that if woken early (5a.m in this case) I probably won’t get back to sleep again. That proved to be the case this morning. I tossed and turned, counted sheep and tried to position my foot in a more comfortable position, all to no avail. My thoughts on whether insomnia is a psychological or, rather, a physiological condition are something that I shall note down another time.

My thoughts on the bizarre Christian shows featured on late night (early morning?) television are the topic of today’s rant.

When one wakes early in the dark ambiguous hours of the morning one feels exactly that: dark and ambiguous. Questions about the direction of ones life, their place in the world and other such disturbing (disturbing, at least in my case!) notions float through ones consciousness like specters: they howl and whisper but prove ethereal and impossible to grasp. But I’ve indulged my crude prose far too much here and I’ve digressed far from my intended topic. What I’m trying to do is build a picture of how I felt when in desperation I turned to the tube for some sort of respite, some alleviation, from my cursed sleeplessness.

Unsettled.

Uncertain.

Unsure.

It is with those three ‘un’ words that I switched on the television and began to channel surf. Normally, I have found that infomercials and motivational shows prove to be good anesthetists for the restless mind. This morning, however, there was no Danoz Direct, and no Chuck Norris attempting to sell me some exercise device; a device intended, in reality, to do more damage to a person’s body than good and thereby enable them opportunity to offer you the next exercise contraption; and so on and so forth… On this particular morning I found no such programming – instead I chanced upon a horror movie (well, not really a movie for it is only 1 hour in length, but you get my point) that features in large part a Christian minister by the name of Benny Hinn.

Now at this point I should make it clear: I’m not a Christian. I do not believe in the westernized assumption of what God constitutes, nor do I subscribe to the polytheistic notions of the east. I make a point of trying to understand the basis of most religions and I like to think of myself as being far more tolerant of their institutions than they themselves are of homosexuals, pro-abortionists and euthanasia advocates. I mention my atheistic tendency in order to highlight the fact that I may possess bias with respect to the issue of Christian television programming. With that out of the way let me declare that if Benny Hinn and the crackpot Rod Parsley that he had on his show this morning are representative of the Christian majority, and if that same Christian majority has as much of a foothold in the Republican government, and consequently American foreign policy, as I’m lead to believe, then the world is in real trouble. The fervor in the eyes of those two freaks transcends any peaceful devotion to a higher power. The rhetoric spewing forth from those clowns mouths was so disturbing that I sat up in my bed.

The bloody rising of Christ and America’s leading roll in bringing the ‘word’ to the masses was the topic of the day. I kept searching their faces looking for a hint of insincerity, a hint that their psychotic outlook was in some way a jest: I was sadly disappointed. I could tell from the way they were talking that they would firmly support crushing anything and anyone that stands in the way of their intended glorious Christian rising. The end of the show featured a 40 second slow motion highlight reel of Benny Hinn ‘healing’ the sick and infirm. To gloriously cheesy music Hinn touched the heads of his flock and they in turn collapsed on the ground in a heap. Scenes of a once wheelchair bound person walking and a child running on the stage still in a cast - obviously from a recently broken leg - were designed, I suppose, to encourage the watcher to want to join in their unholy crusade.

Unsettled.

Uncertain.

Unsure.

That is how I felt before I turned on the television this morning.

When I turned the television off I felt a whole lot worse.