Horizon

Lunar Sabbath

Between the demands of work and family, I don't get much time to do the online loon-watching I did several years ago. Or at least that's what I tell myself — more likely I've just traded that hobby for pipe-carving and blogging. What I do manage to squeeze into my hectic schedule is more likely to come from my shortwave than my laptop, and that's a much less reliable source, being susceptible to interference and padded with dull broadcasts from Havana, Beijing, or Denmark.

Lately, my favorite broadcast has been a show that runs on WWCR every evening, on the "lunar sabbath". There's this guy in Alabama who runs sincere and heavily accented monologues attempting to convince the seeker that proper Christian worship is only carried out if you have your eye on the phases of the moon, and that the usual every-seven-days stuff is no better than sleeping in.

It is hard for me to imagine anything on the religious landscape more quintessitially American than his program. Think about it: one man with no education, no institutional authority, no credentials and no wealth decides that his own reading of the Bible trumps the combined testimony of a billion co-religionists and literally thousands of years of tradition. Armed only with his conscience and an argument that is unanswered (if not unanswerable), he stares that massive consensus in the face and says: "You're wrong."