O Come, All Ye Faithful

As a militant agnostic (it must be true: it says so on my Facebook profile), I have always been wary of anyone who wears their religion on their sleeves. Allow me to quote one of my favorite writers (namely, myself) from a previous blog article that I wrote in April 2010:

Ardent religionists have perpetrated as much evil as any other class of miscreant. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the Protestant-Catholic strife in Northern Ireland to Al-Qaeda, religious extremism has wreaked havoc throughout history. We in the United States are certainly not exempt: the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and misguided individuals like Timothy McVeigh all claimed to be "doing God’s work."

Upon further reflection, however, I have come to a painful realization: I, too, am a religionist. The Green Bay Packers are in fact my religion. Consider the following:

• We have a patron saint: St. Vincent, as in Vincent Thomas Lombardi.
  
• We have a sacred shrine: our Mecca, if you will, located at 1265 Lombardi Avenue in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Its Anglicized name is Lambeau Field. Just as with Muslims, all true fans must make a pilgrimage to that shrine least once in their lives.
  
• We have a doctrinal theology: namely, "Run to Daylight."
  
• We have 11 disciples of that doctrine, not Christianity's 12, but that's only because football rules allow only 11 offensive players on the field at any one time. Just think how the course of religious history might have changed if Judas Iscariot had been excluded from supper by a similar 11-man rule.
  
• We had a wayward prodigal son who was forgiven his sins and ultimately welcomed home: Paul Hornung, who was suspended for the 1963 season for gambling but resumed playing in 1964.
  
• We had our own traitorous Judas Iscariot aka Brett Favre, who betrayed Packer nation by cavorting with arch-rival satans, the Minnesota Vikings. Favre then descended into purgatory when his refusal to cooperate prolonged the league's investigation into his lustful misdeeds just long enough so that his eventual (supposed) retirement rendered a suspension moot.
  
• Like almost every religion, we dress in special garments on Sundays before visiting our places of worship. Unfortunately, blasphemous worshipers in several other major cities like Detroit, Minneapolis, and especially Chicago, are misguided heathens who worship false gods and idols in the form of Lions, Viking Norsemen, and Bears. And, of course, everyone would do well to heed Willie Nelson's fateful warning: "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Cowboys."
  

As you can see, we do have all of the trappings of a formal religion. On the other hand, our religion has never executed anyone; never physically tortured anyone (I exclude the agony inflicted on Packer fans themselves by a starvation diet of just five winning seasons while roaming the desert wastelands during the 25-year-period from 1968 to 1992—and one of those winning seasons ocurred during the strike-shortened winter of 1982); and never started a major war. The only neighborhood invasions we have committed were to fill stadiums (stadia?) on road games to the point of having almost as many fans present as the home team's own fans. And the only territorial claim we have ever made is the following:

Q: What separates the best team in the NFL from all of the other teams?

A: The Wisconsin border.

So, there you have it: it turns out that I am a religionist after all. And though I and my fellow believers are as ardent as those of any other religion, my religion remains far more innocuous than most.

In that spirit of religious tolerance, one final note to the apostates who worship any team with the audacity to defeat the Packers in the upcoming playoffs: you may take comfort in the fact that there will be no fatwa issued—at least, not until after the Super Bowl.