My parents' anniversary gift was nice and cheap: I took Grandma to church so Mom could go to New York overnight. I'll confess I was none too happy to give my parents no gift at all; however, my selfish gift to myself was getting the parents out of the house overnight. First time in... well, ever. Nice to see the 'rents are treating me like an adult. Anyway, I took Grandma to church, and evidently I did a pretty good job of it.

We got there early — now, when Mom used to drag me to church, we never arrived early. We never got a parking space near the church. We sat in the front pew. The whole day made Grandma very happy; me less so. It brought back — I wouldn't call them bad memories — just a bunch of unproductive useless memories reminding me how worthless my time was. I'd been going to church since I was born, questioning church since I could think, and bored with church since sometime in the middle. Not only is it very lonely in the church when you actually have a brain about the whole religion thing, but I get the distinct feeling that my mind is somewhere worlds away from everyone else's.

Example. There's more spirit in a courtroom than there is in that church. You go to a Baptist church, for instance, and the congregants are jumping out of their seats, throwing their arms in the air, shouting "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" as the Holy Spirit enters them. Catholics sit in the pews like God's some sort of matron librarian just itching to shush them. The thing is, when there's no spirit involved, going to church just seems kind of perfunctory. I wonder how much these people — even Mom and Grandma — really believe, and to what extent they're just going to church because it's what they do.

I just don't feel like that impresses God. Neither does the self-righteousness, or praising God as if He's got some sort of complex, or the rituals. I mean, thank goodness my Eucharist (which, come to think of it, I shouldn't have taken) didn't have any rice in it. I want my communion to be God-approved. I can imagine pedantic, insecure humans caring about little details like that, but not an omniscient, omnipotent God. Same deal with the you-should-give-of-yourself homily: what can a mere mortal possibly contribute to God's divine plan? You shouldn't need God to tell you to be a good person.

But as the mass went on and on, I was wondering about the morality of the whole nonsense worshipping event. Right before Grandma leaves her pew, she bows to God. Ignorance makes me sick... but at the same time, it's not really a big deal. It doesn't hurt anybody, and makes Grandma feel good (or self-righteous) about herself. At the same time, forget the gluten-free wafer issue, there are people in the world who see rituals like that as license to bomb abortion clinics or commit genocide or fly planes into buildings. I know, I know, the connection is extremely tenuous. But here's the thing: I walk into Wal-Mart and steal a ninety-nine cent candy bar. It's not really hurting anybody. Wal-Mart is a multi-billion dollar corporation, who, it needs to be said, hires illegal aliens, locks them inside the store overnight, and has no business condemning anyone — and the connection between my stealing a candy bar and my doing any damage to Wal-Mart is also extremely tenuous. If the latter is immoral, then shouldn't the former be too?

That, however, wasn't where I wanted to go. As it turns out, I want to live in a world where it's wrong to steal candy bars and it's not necessarily wrong to bow before God and it's damn wrong to be an ignorant fool and it's morally incumbent upon us to boycott the shit out of Wal-Mart. Let's apply the categorical imperative here: Can we make it a universal law that stealing candy bars from Wal-Mart is wrong? I think we can. It's one thing for me to steal a single candy bar; as much as Wal-Mart sucks ass, I don't really want to live in a world where all six billion of us are stealing candy. How about the bowing thing? Can we make that into a universal law? It'd be just plain creepy if all of us were bowing all the time....

Grumble.

I guess on the plus side, I won't feel guilty stealing from Wal-Mart anymore.