And my heaven will be a big heaven
And I will walk through the front door.
— Peter Gabriel, “Big Time”
Former New York City Mayor Michael “Arbitrary and Capricious” Bloomberg made a very telling boast recently.
He gave the New York Times, in the course of announcing a $50 million campaign against the National Rifle Association, the following vision of heaven:
Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, [Bloomberg] said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”
As George Mason professor of law F.H. Buckley observed in his book The Morality of Laughter, “The modern Puritan devotes himself to political rather than religious duties.”
So apparently Bloomberg, who isn’t even sure God exists, had been using his public office trying to please his conception of what a god would be “if there is” one, by becoming the greatest Puritan of all through sheer political zeal. Ban sugar, ban salt, ban smokes (even e-cigarettes, since they look like real cigarettes), ban choice after choice after choice that might be used for “sin” so as to … um … skip the interview process for a joyless, priggish conception of heaven?
A heaven that, don’t forget, would ruled by a god who smiles on withholding food donations to homeless and poor people following a natural disaster since, after all, “the city is too busy with disaster recovery to properly assess salt, fat, and fiber levels in the donated food, and therefore can’t ensure that it meets nutritional standards.”
