“Matthew 7:26 – But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.“

“Did you go to church today son?” Oh how I dread answering THAT question. In all honesty, I have mad respect for the faithful who can sit through those gruelling church hours chanting prayers and listening to the priest’s monotonous sermon. I apologise, but church is not my cup of wine. Even if I summon enough strength to get my bum to church on Sunday, I find myself struggling to keep my eyes open and “accidentally” dozing off midway through the service.

Now before you start grabbing your pitchforks, I just want to make myself clear here; I am not an atheist. I’ve spent more hours than I’d care to admit debating edgy pastafarians and dinkoists online. If anything, I’d call myself a religious apatheist. To the uninitiated, apatheism is a fancy word for “I don’t care”. So pardon my French when I say I don’t give enough ‘bless yous’ to get out of bed in the morning and hear a lecture on the gazillion ways I can find myself burning in hell by nightfall.

You might be brushing off my opinions as nothing more than noises from a brainless sloth. But if you must know, my dislike of this ritual is nothing new and it isn’t out of any folly. It actually arose in my toddler-mind after intense logical analyses and many past-bed-times dedicated to finding a theodicy for a certain conundrum I had back then.

Back when I was a wee boy, there was only one thing I used to look forward to on the weekends; sunday morning cartoons! Dexter’s Laboratory, Courage the Cowardly Dog and the Powerpuff Girls; THEY were the holy grail of my childhood. But to my chagrin, Mass would air at exactly the same time-slot. So Sunday mornings often were just me grumpily asking Jesus to explain His seemingly shoddy timing rising from the dead. My growing mind even came up with a neat little prayer at the time;

“Our Father who art in heaven,

Donteth Thee in all thine wisdom and power knoweth Ben 10 wast running on Le Old Cartoon Network at the same time? After all, Thou, being parteth of the Holy Trinity, hast all the time in the cosmos. Couldn’t my Lord have waited till Monday to giveth us Thine gift of eternal life? I prayeth Thy shifteth Church then so school can be skippedeth. Also, Jeremy had calleth me a poopie during recess yesterday and I pray that thou smite him with a lightning bolt tonight.

Amen.”

I wonder why God never bothered to reply though. My best theory is that church hours are actually the devil’s trick to get devotees to resent God at a tender age. Maybe it’s the church’s timings rather than Dawkins that’s making atheists out of the public.

After all, why go to church? If God is omnipresent and He simultaneously exists at all positions in the space-time continuum, he’s sleeping with me in my bed too! Why do I need to go to Church when God Himself has come to tuck me back to sleep? To reiterate what the great philosopher Homer (Simpson) observed, doesn’t the Almighty have much more important things to worry about than where one measly little man spends his Sunday morning? Maybe we’re doing a disservice to God to ask Him to give us His attention when there’s probably a tornado swooshing around at the other side of the earth. And what if we picked the wrong religion? Maybe we’re making Shiva angrier and angrier by falling on our knees to his existential rival. I, for one, do not want to face the wrath of Shiva’s shaapam. I’d rather burn to smithereens for laziness than for theistic adultery.

In any case, I’ll start responsibly going to church soon enough. If the Almighty wills, He will teleport me from my slumber right to church every week. Or maybe the Eucharist will be deliverable on Amazon in a few years. Till then, I think we should all remember Matthew 21:17.

Amen.