For those of us who don't have cable, TV is a wasteland. Sure, there's \The Simpsons"" and ""Temptation Island II,"" but most programming is unvarnished crap along the lines of ""That '80s Show."" With this in mind, it was a joy to discover a wealth of entertaining TV just a click away. Channel 47, the Three Angels Broadcasting Network, just might be the best thing on TV.
The stars of 3ABN seem to follow every possible clich??d stereotype about religion. A man with a porn star mustache and a woman whose perm certainly seems miraculous ramble on, managing to sound both vapid and sanctimonious.
Occasionally, they will pause to break into song or sell some product. These aren't the only stars, of course. There is the old man who, with the help of his trusty giant Pictionary board, manages to explain how all the fossils people find were really put there by God some 4,000 years ago.
There is also a cooking show, where the host patiently explains that ""God's sugars"" are good for you, but ""man's sugars"" are not. In short, it's everything you expect a religious channel to be. And it's hilarious.
Religion has not meant a thing to me since I was 12 years old. When I was young, I used to believe, really believe, in all the gaudy pageantry, but somewhere the whole thing just lost its magic. Religion, as I experienced it, was old men in old robes spouting older platitudes about love and peace while condemning homosexuality, premarital sex and a woman's right to choose. What's not to love? So I became, like many of my friends, an atheist. For the most part, it has worked out great; I get to think what I want and I get to make fun of ""crazy Christers"" like the ones on 3ABN.
A friend of mine told me that after this year, he was entering the seminary. It's a big step, the first of many on the long road toward becoming a priest. I didn't know what to say. It was a complete shock. We had never discussed religion or God or anything like that. I knew he went to church, but I assumed that it was for the same reasons that many people go to church'obligation, force of habit, the desire to drink red wine on Sunday mornings, those sorts of things. I was wrong. I told him that I was happy for him and I was telling the truth, I think.
He feels it, whatever it is, and I do not. It is good that he does. There is a grace and a poetry in devoting one's life to an ideal, a certain purity of form that deserves respect even if the ideal is flawed. Even if you think the ideal is strange and wrongheaded and maybe responsible for the Crusades, the Taliban and a host of other evils.
I think he will be a good priest, which means, I suppose, that there is such a thing as a good priest. I think he will pick out the good things about religion and leave some of the trash behind. Still, it's hard for me to compare my friend to the former hippie who likens the ""healing power of Christ's love"" to LSD on Channel 47.
