I remember sitting in church in my early teens, wondering what priests and rabbis and ministers and the like would do if God were scientifically disproved, like what they'd do for a living and such. Because I figured if God were exposed as myth, fairy tale, imagination figment, etc, people would stop frequenting places of worship and engaging in asinine ritualistic behaviours like praying and blindly handing over hard-earned cash. I actually felt sorry for these spiritual advisors who might soon be out of a job and reduced to who knows what, and even more screwed with that security net of God's gentle hand no longer there to catch them. But not too sorry, for I figured they'd heeded their calling with full knowledge of the potential job-security issues surrounding God's existential status, questionable at best even to me, a 14-year-old boy attending church because he hadn't yet realized he could just say no. I'd never heard of Nietzsche or Sartre or Dawkins; but thanks to grade nine English, Inherit The Wind had introduced me to Darwin. After gaining a fair grasp of the material and its implications, I was pretty sure that if you somehow found a door marked 'God' and knocked on it, no one would answer. Plus, questioning God's existence seemed somehow cool, rebellious, against parents and establishment. I'm surprised more teens back then didn't profess to agnosticism or atheism as rebellious gesture. Though today it's a different story. Society's decidedly more secular bent means greater numbers of agnostic and atheist parents means far fewer opportunities to rebel by rejecting God. I'm surprised more teens today don't profess some sort of faith as rebellious gesture.

Here now to address that early-teen curiosity of mine is my slow-boiling anger:

'The blunt shiv truth is, no matter how sensible and enlightened the vast majority of people may claim to be, they're lying. Look at all the fools who still cling with every morsel of sanity and ego to the idea, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, of a super-intelligent being that designed the universe and its myriad forms and functions. How can these people claim to be sensible and enlightened? No, young Impudent Hack, don't worry about your priests and rabbis and ministers. They won't lose their jobs any time soon. Not all of them, anyway, the bastards.'

Thank you, my slow-boiling anger, for that impassioned if somewhat bitter response. Funny you should add that last bit. A few days ago I saw the minister from Dad's ebbing congregation (despite newfound atheist sympathies, Dad still attends church for its social aspects), the good Reverend Stickypaper, I saw him working as a greeter at WalMart. Augmenting his income? Talk about the fall of Icarus. Anyway so yeah, spiritual advisors of the world need not fear losing their livelihood any time soon. But then I got thinking: when that fear's time finally does arrive, and it will — after the generations have weeded out all the silly fiendish spells and 97.8% of the world's population has been cured of its religious delirium, leaving only a few cultish follower-zealots to be fought over and divvied up among the few cultish preacher-zealots willing to scrap it out for a share of the diminished believer-pie — all those fine young men and women of the cloth, tragic victims of a cruel numbers game, may still have a legitimate out. The way I see it, they know how to talk fervently and they know how to ask for money. Perfect skill set for a politician. And the work environment isn't all that different — corrupt and self-promotional — so aspiring candidates should feel right at home in their transition. The world already has too many politicians; what's a few dozen thousand more?

Just one problem. Competition for jobs could be fierce. Because politics, like religion, seems to be suffering its own slow death. I mean really: never have so many people said so many things that mean so little. And constituents know this. Religion and politics are learning the hard way that strained credibility is just plain bad for business. These venerated pillars of civilization, these huge moneymaking industries, can only watch helplessly as ambivalence and apathy erode their once-grand support bases to small, isolated, cult-like fraternities. Pews and polling booths are emptier than ever before, though I should qualify that statement by saying it's more guess than fact. When I attended church as a kid, the pews would be packed, standing room only; now when I go, once a year to hear Dad sing in the Candlelight service, the pews are two-thirds empty. Having had little personal experience with voting, I can render no equivalent analogy. I can, however, say this: as Canadian voter turnout for federal elections has plummeted since the eighties (75.3% in 1988, 59.1% in 2008), my own personal voter turnout has risen dramatically. That is to say I'd never voted until 2004, and that year I voted for one reason and one reason only: Ken Dryden, Hockey Hero. Sure, he won his constituency and the Grits won the election, but nothing changed. So I didn't vote in 2006 and the Tories won that election, and guess what? Nothing changed again. So this time around I voted Green, and my bold prediction is: Nothing Will Change. Should be the standard campaign slogan. So I look forward to a medidistant future — perhaps beyond my lifetime — in which populist support for both politics and religion has shrunk to satirically tiny levels; what's more, these support bases will overlap, with political and religious factions duking it out for the same dollars. I can see it now, the clash I've fantasized about my whole life, two thousand years in the making: the face-smiting, knuckle-splitting, last-man-standing cage match between Priests and Lawyers. Watch Holy Water and Habeas Corpus, live, only on C-Span.

By: The Impudent Hack