Two years ago, a joint study by professors at U. C. Berkeley and Duke University revealed that since WWII, the ratio of Americans devoid of religious affiliation or practice has quadrupled to one in five.  While the massive decades-long influx of Latin American Catholics was already imbedded in the numbers, more recent immigration flows are not.   Still, an hour of casual observation at LAX or any college campus would do little to alter the results: Chinese hegemonists seem to outweigh Muslim terrorists by roughly four to one.

It cannot be of surprise, then, that the secular world has come to replace the church in terms of providing answers to profound questions of ethics and cosmology.  Nowadays we do our confessing on a therapist’s couch and find comfort by comparing ourselves to the truly repugnant fringe element of our diaper fetish Internet group.  And while priests still comprise the vanguard of child molestation, it should be noted that Congress is proving a worthy challenger.  Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was indicted for lying to the FBI in regards to large sums of money he paid to a former student to quash revelations that Hastert, then a high school teacher and wrestling coach, had sexually abused the boy.  What makes matters worse, in this post-Ray Rice epoch, is that a video has recently surfaced corroborating the victim’s account.   The good news for Hastert (and former Republican compatriots Larry Craig, Mark Foley and Aaron Schock) is that overt homosexuality no longer precludes induction as a Boy Scout Troop Leader.  Who wants a merit badge for Water Sports or Leatherwork?

While Catilyn Jenner is but the latest, if not the most, high profile person to change its sex, I can’t recall, before Ruby Rose, any celebrity that identified as “gender fluid.”  And certainly Rachel Dolezal is the first transracial I’ve ever heard of.  (Memo to Madonna and Angelina Jolie: adopted black kids can actually rub off on your own offspring.)  Right wing Christians take all this chaos and impermanence as evidence that the end of days is nigh.  Ted Cruz is frantically herding American Jews back to Israel, where Mike Huckabee is feverishly stoking the ovens.  Meanwhile, James Patterson’s new television series, “Zoo”, in which the animal kingdom rises against the humans, has become a modern day “War of the Worlds”; people have begun to interpret the recent spate of shark attacks (including one during the live broadcast of a world surfing competition) and wildlife maulings as a coordinated effort to wipe us out.

Enter Minnesota Dentist Walter Palmer, who is singlehandedly attempting to reestablish the balance of power.  On a recent trip to Africa, Palmer illegally shot and killed Zimbabwe’s famed Cecil the Lion.  Cecil not only generated hundreds of thousands of tourist dollars, he was a subject of an ongoing Oxford University study.  No matter, Palmer and his henchmen lured the noble beast out of his refuge, executed him, removed his GPS tracking collar, and then, in a move worthy of ISIS, beheaded him.  If God wants to recapture that wayward twenty percent of the polity, herein lays a golden opportunity; Palmer’s bloody and twisted corpse discovered in Central Park, with evidence suggesting he had been date raped by Bill Cosby only hours before being taken down by a pack of rabid squirrels.  Amen to that.