This story is getting reported a lot today.

The Global Language Monitor website says it acknowledges that the word Tebowing — the act of taking a knee in prayer during an athletic contest — is now part of the English language.

In today’s online world, that’s practically the equivalent of gaining acceptance to Webster’s Dictionary.
—Tom Weir, USA Today, 12-12-2011

It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that being mentioned on the site is practically the same as being accepted into Webster’s Dictionary, but whatever, that’s not what I want to comment on in this entry.

Instead I want to comment on the phenomenal arrogance of Tim Tebow and so many in sports, entertainment, politics and public life. People of talent should be grateful they have it, and it is well and good that they give thanks. But there is a very big difference between that and praying for victory, pointing to the heavens after scoring, or giving God thanks in a victory speech. Does God really care who wins the Grammy for Best Rap Album or who carries the ball over the line in last Sunday’s game?

Thanking God for such personal achievements is tantamount to claiming to be chosen by god over all others, specifically given victory over your opponents by divine intervention. What are the implications of such claims? Did God rig the vote or influence the voters of the Grammys? Did the defensive line of the the other team lose their ability to block because they didn’t pray enough? What happens when the both teams pray a lot! To thank God for something that is essentially a personal achievement is to stake a huge claim.  One had better be pretty confident, or the next time God may feel compelled to correct the misconception with a crushing defeat.

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I personally don’t know if there is a god and if there is, I would never presume to know his mind, but we live in a world in which 43.6 million Americans live in poverty. Worldwide somewhere around 925 million people will go hungry today. Nearly 8 million people die from cancer annually. There were nearly a dozen ongoing conflicts globally in 2011 that resulted in at least 1000 deaths, some many thousand deaths. For the last year I’ve seen statistics, there were more than 7000 hate crimes based on race, religion, sexuality and other factors in the United States. Among the disasters the world witnessed in 2011 where massive floods in Australia in January, the Japanese Tsunami is March, Hurricane Irene on the East Coast of the US in August, and floods in the Philippines in December. Tim Tebow has the gall to assume that an omnipresent, omniscient god is listening to the prayers he performs in such a very public manner and ensuring his team wins the game, but yet he does nothing about all those other problems.

I am tired of people behaving as if they have some special pull with the Almighty! It’s awfully presumptuous. It’s awfully self-aggrandizing, too. All these public displays of piety, are they really for the glorification of God or for the glorification of Tim Tebow? Tebow often has Bible verses in white in the black below his eyes. He should try Matthew 6:5-6 in which Jesus himself said during the the Sermon on the Mount

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

I do not wish to be too harsh on Tebow specifically. So many celebrities in popular culture, sports, and people famous for simply being famous behave similarly, as if God were just one of their entourage. It’s astonishing in its hypocrisy, though I am not sure they realize it. If they were anywhere near as saintly as they want us to believe, they’d probably not be asking the heavens to bring them personal glory in their next touchdown run, but rather for redress of some of the other horrific issues confronting the world today.  But hey, maybe I’ve got it all wrong, and maybe that’s why I don’t hear the voice of God.

A more humorous, i.e. outrageous, take on the subject of prayer in America more generally.