Good News, Improved!

Dead Horse Ranch State Park, AZ

  

Shabbat, the Sabbath, is a rare thing: a happy religious rule--one we need more of. Take a day off? Yes Lord I will! Easiest commandment ever! Also a great equalizer: take away our jobs and our playtime nonsense and we are all pretty much the same specks in the Cosmos.

No matter Whom or What they worship, everyone in this godforsaken United States needs a day off work. This should be rigorously enforced, but only with cultural pressure--police need a break too. Workaholics, halt! Moms, spend a day in the sunshine drinking beer. Even criminals, bankers, and criminal bankers, should rest from their labors at least one outta seven.

Prescott AZ, courthouse square

Close every place of business, unplug every electro-gadget. Lie around and think and talk, walk around the neighborhood. Save all the money everyone would have spent. Society would change dramatically with obedience to this simple command from the Judeo/Christian/Islamic Invisible Super-Being. Take a day off, for Christ’s sake, and make it holy!

(Side-note to True Believers: wanting to eat at Denny’s after church does not constitute “an ox fallen into a pit.” Luke 14:5 KJV)

Dead Horse Ranch State Park, AZ

Better yet--if the Eternal Dude needed one day of rest, shouldn’t Mortal Dudes and Dudines get two, or five? The Torah was oral tradition for centuries before it was written down, say scholars; every word was personally dictated by Yahweh, argue the sheep; both can agree that someone muffed the punt on this one. All it would have taken is one brave storyteller to change the narrative a bit...

 “And on the fourth day, God realized He’d been working too much, what was the hurry after all? 

 "So He took the rest of the afternoon off, and blessed the fifth, sixth, and seventh days for fun, and long naps.

 "Thus it was decreed for eternity.” 

 Or if taking dictation, a prophet/secretary intimate enough with the Lord to argue: “One day off a week? Are you kidding me? Not another dagesh unless we all get weekends off!”

(Informational tidbit: It was labor unions, not the Lord or his prophets, who brought us the modern two-day “week-end." Praise be unto them!)

Dead Horse Ranch State Park AZ

Employed humans in the United States already work more hours than the rest of the world. You don’t need a second job, you need a second day off. Money and success are not God, despite what some of the wackier preachers yack. Every second you spend working for something other than food and shelter is wasted. Screw fashion and fancy stuff, take another day off instead.

And woe unto them who spend those blessed days in church, forced to worship their Metaphysical Magician from inside a building! Better to worship the Wonderful World: the friends and family you love, at a lake, a forest, or a dirt backyard. Even a saloon is better than church--you can leave any time without passing rows of self-righteous eyeballs. I remember as a less and less devout youth, looking out the high church windows at a blue spring sky, and realizing deep in my soul: “If I was God...I sure as heck wouldn’t hang round this boring-ass place.”

Dead Horse Ranch State Park AZ

More Sabbath! We could pray daily worldwide for more days off, or simply re-unionize. Better yet: I have as much right to speak for “God” as any other self-appointed moron. I know in my heart She wants us to have three-day weekends forever. Be it so decreed. Now let us go forth, and spread the joy of more time off, and hope of fun: a New and Improved Gospel!

%$#@!

Prescott AZ

“The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, (1875-1961)