THIS BLOG POST IS DEFINITELY A RANT

…so if you prefer not to read something “devout” Christians, Muslims, Jews or fundamentalist of any religious sect will probably find offensive, skip this one.

Because I’m male, in Turkey I’d be allowed to laugh at the international news report that Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç gave advice to women on what he and God expect women not to do when they are in a public place and find something funny.  He began by saying, “Where are our girls, who slightly blush, lower their heads and turn their eyes away when we look at their face, becoming the symbol of chastity?”  He went on to say that a woman “will not laugh in public.  She will not be inviting in her attitudes and will protect her chasteness.”  The response of many Turkish women and the majority of women in America has been to laugh out loud. Some have sent “selfies” of themselves laughing to the Deputy Prime Minister.

I don’t have to look far to find laughable advice to women (and men) from individuals, institutions, and businesses in my own culture that offer advice which they claim to be based on beliefs as staggeringly ignorant as the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister’s notions about laughing women.  It’s not the Deputy Prime Minister’s ignorance about women that should alarm us but his ridiculous notion that there is a god somewhere who takes a personal interest in what women find amusing and cares where they laugh. I pay attention to billboards and television advertisements… can’t help myself.  That billboard with the picture of a jalapeño burger starts my salivary juices pumping.  I want one.  I’m going to get one soon and see if it’s as good as that photograph promises it will be... But if the fast food company selling the jalapeño burger tried to promote it by saying God wants me to buy it instead of a burger from another fast food chain, I’d quickly lose my appetite for it and… and I’d lose my respect for anybody who’d fall for such an ignorant idea.  Just before dinner tonight I sat down to watch the evening news on T.V. and a slick commercial slithered across the screen for a short minute with just a hint of sanctimony playing on the sound tract, and the visual message of a lovely woman and a handsome man  standing intimately close looking lovingly into each other eyes while a reverential male voice suggested that a commercial enterprise called ChristianMingle can find God’s match for me. 

You’d think a sales pitch as crass and blatantly phony as that wouldn’t be very effective, but you’d be wrong.  I learned that Spark Networks, Inc., a publicly traded company (NYSE Amex: LOV) is doing very well.  The company has been in business since 1997 when it launched the Jewish dating site, JDate. ChristianMingle was a natural.  Christians are apparently even easier to fool than Jews, and there are more of them.  1,800,000 people per month use ChristianMingle, and visit the site a total of 11,000,000 times. 

God isn’t finding a way for Palestinians and Israelites to live together in peace, or for Shites and Sunnis to settle their differences, or for Catholics and Protestants… and the list of god-related groups that can’t reconcile grows; but 1,800,000 people per month use ChristianMingle to find God’s choice of a mate for them???  Boggles the mind.