Be sober, be vigilant.

I've been making a half-hearted attempt to decide on a religious sect recently. It has to be some vein of Christianity; otherwise, my Mom won't be placated and I'll stand no chance of spending time with her in the afterlife. I say half-hearted because I haven't really thought of any options aside from evangelical protestantism and catholicism. I don't fancy chinese church; been there, done that. Claire is irreparably catholic and it may be advantageous to follow suit so as to present our children with a unified front. Catholicism, in many respects, does have a personal appeal--catholics are very reticent about public displays of their faith, they have less of a tendency to ground their beliefs in emotion, and I like the structure of ritual. From what I've heard, mass does not often exceed an hour, which is important to me because my time is valuable. On the other hand, many of the Catholics I've met view Christianity as more of a sense of decorum and tradition rather than the centerpiece of a well-lived life. In that case, what's really the point?

It's always bothered me that girls that I've fucked in the past have professed to be serious Christians. They failed to apprehend the internal inconsistency, at least not in any way that was demonstrable to me. I generally don't have chaste, lights-off sex. I perpetrate my filth on others, and having done so, I never understood how they could get up, wipe themselves off, and go to church the next morning. I spent eight years of my life in a futile effort to keep myself from spanking off four times a day--it reduces your life expectancy by a day at a time, as the old adage goes--and it peeved me that my significant others didn't feel constrained by the same sense of guilt. In hindsight, my approach was reductio ad absurdum--I didn't want to be a hypocrite so I decided to be an unrepentant asshole. Stupid.

Katrina and New Orleans have not resonated with me emotionally, at least not to the extent that they should. I spent nearly all of my childhood and adolescence in the area, and it's indisputably a tragedy of the first magnitude. Claire said that it reminded her of Saramago's book, Blindness. I think that's apt. But even so, I don't feel the things that you would hope a reasonably empathetic person to emote in response to these events. It may have to do with some unacknowledged, but substantial racial animus. Or as Wayne alluded to, the solipsism with which the privileged lead their day to day lives. But I think it's more laziness--I didn't want to see film coverage, even though Claire explained that it would bring things home; I didn't want to read print coverage beyond the daily headlines; and lastly, I didn't want to even think about the misery, in any concrete sense, that people were going through while I sat on my couch watching the real world. I understood what was going on, but did not want to confront it in any meaningful way. Which leads me to believe that immorality isn't the product of our inherent propensity for sin; rather, it's the end result of our moral lethargy. I think each and every one of us possesses a reasonably well-tuned moral compass--right and wrong are not the most difficult values to divine. The problem with humanity is its failure to execute.