Oh, how sweet. Something good is going to come out of the Gulf oil spill. While the ocean is poisoned, sea birds tremble and die, fish and marine invertebrates are suffocated, work crews labor to contain the spreading oil slick, rescue workers struggle to clean animals tarred with sludge, and BP (we hope) tries to throttle the ruptured pipe, devout Christians gather to stand around, hold hands, and mumble at the clouds. They must have worked very hard to come up with that kind of pointless time-waster.

This is not a protest. It’s not about belly-aching. This is an opportunity for people to come together and show support for each other. It’s also an opportunity to have a moment of silence in memory of the 11 people who passed away in the accident and the people along the Gulf Coast who have been affected, whose livelihoods are gone because of this.

And don’t forget…a chance to parade your piety on the 10:00 news! That’s actually the primary purpose of prayer vigils, because it’s not as if they do anything.

Everyone is so angry and frustrated and we need to unite instead. We’re all tired. We’re all frustrated. This is a chance to just turn it over to someone else for a minute.

Someone else? Who? The people working on the coast or on boats? I think they’ve got enough work to do.

Oh, you mean God. He’s a useless old git who never gets anything done. Why you’d think it would be at all productive to hand off the work to a phantasm is a mystery. Is it because an immaterial nonexistent ghost would be far more productive than any gang of pious sky-mumblers?