Its Sunday, so I feel I should talk about Church.

I started the morning by going flying. I was getting checked out in a Tampico. Just another single engine, slow, bug smashing airplane. It has some nice points - specifically the seats are so comfortable they feel like arm chairs and the whole cockpit seemed pretty ergonomically laid out. It was a little sluggish to climb and accelerate, but it made up for that by being quite sporty on turns. Most of all, its nice to have another airplane available to me to fly (especially another one with an IFR GPS, yay!)

While I was driving home though, I had lots of time to contemplate the state of Churches in the south. I'm usually such an anti-establishment person, but these so-called Churches that spring up around here really do scare me a little. Every public school becomes a Church on the weekend - many have no permanent home. Others are built like temporary buildings. None have any affiliation, except maybe loose-knit organizations, with any established denomination. Instead they just call themselves "Christian". They have ministers who I really can only call self-ordained. I know this because I have met people who have become "ministers" in these churches who have no formal theological education.

New churches spring up, and if they are good (or entertaining) their attendence blooms. Then when a new one (or more entertaining one) springs up down the street, their "loyal" congragation just moves on to the next new thing in town.

This is the city with Lakewood Church... remember.. its in the Compaq Center, where Houston's NBA team used to play.

Even scarier is the church down the street from me, Grace. It sprung up on the highway a few years ago with a massive facility and a huge billboard. Many of my coworkers immediately switched their loyalty and started attending there. Its latest plans to use its money... not to help the poor and downtrodden of Houston or the world... but to build a 150 ft cross to mark our city for God. Great, another eyesore on the I-45 feeder to go with the oversized flags that "mark our city" for used car lots and the flashing neon signs and strobe lights that "mark our city" for strip clubs.

The worst is when you talk to one of the really evangelical "Christians" that like to toss out the Bible as something you follow literally. They throw out their favorite passages that they've memorized, and try to forget the scarier ones, which demonstrates to me that most haven't even bothered to read the Bible that they are supposed to be following "literally" in its entirity. But as long as their minister says the earth is 6000 years old, its ok to follow like a blind lemming, because that's what God wants... By the way, I've recently taken people who follow the Bible literally to read this web page, which has a whole lot of evil Bible quotes that I hope people don't follow...